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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Wings and the Child
+       or, the Building of Magic Cities
+
+Author: E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+Illustrator: George Barraud
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2012 [EBook #38977]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS AND THE CHILD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINGS AND THE CHILD
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY E. NESBIT
+
+    CHILDREN'S BOOKS
+
+    THE MAGIC CITY
+    THE WONDERFUL GARDEN
+    THE MAGIC WORLD
+    THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
+    OSWALD BASTABLE
+    HARDING'S LUCK
+    THE TREASURE SEEKERS
+    THE WOULDBEGOODS
+    FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
+    THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET
+    THE AMULET
+    THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
+    NINE UNLIKELY TALES
+    THE HOUSE OF ARDEN
+    THE BOOK OF DRAGONS
+    WET MAGIC
+
+
+    FICTION
+
+    THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST
+    DAPHNE IN FITZROY STREET
+    THESE LITTLE ONES
+    MAN AND MAID
+    SALOME AND THE HEAD
+    THE RED HOUSE
+    DORMANT
+    THE LITERARY SENSE
+    IN HOMESPUN
+    FEAR
+
+
+    POETRY
+
+    LAYS AND LEGENDS. 1st Series
+    LAYS AND LEGENDS. 2nd Series
+    LEAVES OF LIFE
+    THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE
+    A POMANDER OF VERSE
+    BALLADS AND LYRICS
+    JESUS IN LONDON
+    BALLADS AND LYRICS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
+    NEW POEMS
+
+[Illustration: _Photo David Norris_
+
+E. Nesbit
+
+[_Frontispiece._]
+
+
+
+
+    WINGS AND THE CHILD
+
+    OR
+
+    THE BUILDING OF MAGIC CITIES
+
+    BY
+
+    E. NESBIT
+
+    AUTHOR OF
+    "THE MAGIC CITY," "THE WOULDBEGOODS," ETC., ETC.
+
+    WITH PICTURES BY GEORGE BARRAUD AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+    HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+    NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+_Printed in 1913_
+
+
+
+
+TO THE READER
+
+
+WHEN this book first came to my mind it came as a history and theory of
+the building of Magic Cities on tables, with bricks and toys and little
+things such as a child may find and use. But as I kept the thought by me
+it grew and changed, as thoughts will do, until at last it took shape as
+an attempt to contribute something, however small and unworthy, to the
+science of building a magic city in the soul of a child, a city built of
+all things pure and fine and beautiful. As you read, it will, I hope,
+seem to you that something of what I say is true--in much, no doubt, it
+will seem to you that I am mistaken; but however you may disagree with
+me, you will, I trust, at least have faith in the honesty of my purpose.
+If I seem to you to be too dogmatic, to lay down the law too much as
+though I were the teacher and you the learner, I beg you to believe that
+it is in no such spirit that I have written. Rather it is as though you
+and I, spending a quiet evening by your fire, talked together of the
+things that matter, and as though I laid before you all the things that
+were in my heart--not stopping at every turn to say "Do you not think so
+too?" and "I hope you agree with me?" but telling you, straight from the
+heart, what I have felt and thought and, I humbly say, known about
+children and the needs of children. I have talked to you as to a friend,
+without the reservations and apologies which we use with strangers. And
+if, in anything, I shall have offended you, I entreat you to extend to
+me the forgiveness and the forbearance which you would exercise towards
+a friend who had offended you, not meaning to offend, and to believe
+that I have spoken to you as frankly and plainly as I would wish you to
+speak to me, were you the writer and I the reader.
+
+                                                   E. NESBIT.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    _PART I_
+
+                                 PAGE
+    CHAPTER I
+    OF UNDERSTANDING                3
+
+    CHAPTER II
+    NEW WAYS                        9
+
+    CHAPTER III
+    PLAYTHINGS                     17
+
+    CHAPTER IV
+    IMAGINATION                    24
+
+    CHAPTER V
+    OF TAKING ROOT                 33
+
+    CHAPTER VI
+    BEAUTY AND KNOWLEDGE           42
+
+    CHAPTER VII
+    OF BUILDING AND OTHER MATTERS  54
+
+    CHAPTER VIII
+    THE MORAL CODE                 67
+
+    CHAPTER IX
+    PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT          82
+
+    CHAPTER X
+    THE ONE THING NEEDFUL          94
+
+
+    _PART II_
+
+    CHAPTER I
+    ROMANCE IN GAMES              107
+
+    CHAPTER II
+    BUILDING CITIES               118
+
+    CHAPTER III
+    BRICKS--AND OTHER THINGS      130
+
+    CHAPTER IV
+    THE MAGIC CITY                143
+
+    CHAPTER V
+    MATERIALS                     156
+
+    CHAPTER VI
+    COLLECTIONS                   165
+
+    CHAPTER VII
+    THE POOR CHILD'S CITY         177
+
+    CHAPTER VIII
+    THE END                       190
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+    PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                      PAGE
+
+    THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE              8
+
+    NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE      13
+
+    HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE           18
+
+    THE TOMB IN THE DESERT              18
+
+    STONEHENGE                          22
+
+    THE TREE LIKE A MAN                 27
+
+    POPPY DOLL                          29
+
+    DOVES AND DRAGON                    30
+
+    THE ASTROLOGER'S TOWER              32
+
+    THE SILVER TOWERS                   34
+
+    FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH              35
+
+    THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE                40
+
+    THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED           47
+
+    A CHINESE TEMPLE                    52
+
+    THE SQUARE TOWER                    56
+
+    SHELL ARCHES                        57
+
+    HANDKERCHIEF TENTS                  65
+
+    ONE HALF OF THE CITY                72
+
+    THE TAIL OF PUSS                    78
+
+    THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY          82
+
+    THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT           96
+
+    OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES           97
+
+    THE PALACE OF CATS                 120
+
+    GUARDED ARCH                       123
+
+    BOXES                              135
+
+    ARCHES AND PILLARS                 140
+
+    PILLARED COURT                     141
+
+    MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM       148
+
+    THE GUARD-ROOM                     149
+
+    THE DOMINO DOOR                    150
+
+    LARCH PALM                         152
+
+    THE MAGIC CITY                     152
+
+    HONESTY PILLARS                    159
+
+    TREES                              166
+
+    THICK ARCHES                       168
+
+    FAN WINDOW                         169
+
+    THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE                171
+
+    HONESTY ROOF                       174
+
+    CLOTHES PEGS                       181
+
+    TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE        185
+
+    COTTON REELS                       186
+
+    LATTICE WINDOWS                    187
+
+
+
+
+_PART I_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Of Understanding
+
+
+IT is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I
+set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special
+means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be
+known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.
+And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the
+recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from
+observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may
+observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce
+from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the
+grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a
+child's soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the
+knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a
+child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked
+to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood,
+besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening
+memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the
+observation of children--other children. There is a freemasonry between
+children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must
+be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how
+sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and
+the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed--and this gulf, the gulf
+between one generation and another, can never be really bridged. You may
+learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes in rare cases to lean
+very far across it so that you can just touch the tips of the little
+fingers held out from the other side. But if your dealings with those on
+the other side of the gulf are to be just, generous, noble, and helpful,
+they must be motived and coloured by your memories of the time when you
+yourself were on the other side--when you were a child full of your own
+hopes, dreams, aims, interests, instincts, and imaginings, and over
+against you, kindly perhaps, tenderly loving, often tenderly loved, but
+still in some mysterious way antagonistic and counting as "Them," were
+the grown-ups. I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors
+and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for
+all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully
+and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people
+who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a
+child. And Time marks with the same outward brand those who have
+forgotten and those who do not forget. So that even the few who have
+managed to slip past the Customs-house with their bundle of memories
+intact can never fully display them. These are a sort of contraband, and
+neither the children nor the grown-ups will ever believe that that which
+we have brought with us from the land of childhood is genuine. The
+grown-ups accuse us of invention, sometimes praise us for it, when all
+we have is memory; and the children imagine that we must have been
+watching them, and thus surprised a few of their secrets, when all that
+we have is the secrets which were our own when we were children--secrets
+which were so bound up with the fibre of our nature that we could never
+lose them, and so go through life with them, our dearest treasures. Such
+people feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world. For
+a middle-aged gentleman with a beard or a stout elderly lady with
+spectacles to move among other elderly and spectacled persons feeling
+that they are still children, and that the other elderly and spectacled
+ones are really grown-ups, seems thoroughly unreasonable, and therefore
+those who have never forgotten do not, as a rule, say anything about it.
+They just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any
+one--but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is
+like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and
+wrinkles, his skilful brush that paints out the tints and the contours
+of youth, his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders and pillows for
+the waist, disguises the actors well enough, and they go through life
+altogether unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world which to them
+has always been the child's world, the tired hands loose the earthly
+possessions which have, to them, been ever the toys of the child. And
+deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come
+it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
+
+Such people as these are never pessimists, though they may be sinners;
+and they will be trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up would
+call imbecility. To them the world will be, from first to last, a
+beautiful place, and every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise, hurting
+them like a sudden blow. They will never learn prudence, or parsimony,
+nor know, with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up, the things
+that are or are not done by the best people. All their lives they will
+love, and expect love--and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not
+get it. They will expect beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and
+splendours from a grown-up world which has forgotten what impulse was:
+and to the very end they will not leave off expecting. They will be
+easily pleased and easily hurt, and the grown-ups in grain will
+contemplate their pains and their pleasures with an uncomprehending
+irritation.
+
+If these children, disguised by grown-up bodies, are ever recognised for
+what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their
+pens--when they write for and about children. Then grown-up people will
+call them intelligent and observant, and children will write to them and
+ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question, "How did you know?" For if
+they can become articulate they will speak the language that children
+understand, and children will love, not them, for their identity is
+cloaked with grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There are some of
+these in whom the fire of genius burns up and licks away the trappings
+under which Time seeks to disguise them--Andersen, Stevenson, Juliana
+Ewing were such as these--and the world knows them for what they were,
+and adores in them what in the uninspired it would decry and despise.
+
+To these others who have the memories of childhood untainted and yet
+have not the gift and relief of words, to these I address myself in the
+first instance, because they will understand without any involved
+explanation on my part what it is that I am driving at, and it is these
+who, alone, can teach the real grown-ups the things which they have
+forgotten. For these things can be taught, these things can be
+re-learned. I would have every man and woman in whom the heart of
+childhood still lives, protest, however feebly and haltingly, yet with
+all the power of the heart, against machine-made education--against the
+instruction which crams a child with facts and starves it of dreams,
+which forces the free foot into heavy boots and bids it walk on narrow
+pavement, which crushes with heavy hand the wings of the soul, and
+presses the flower of imagination flat between the pages of a lexicon.
+
+[Illustration: THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE.
+
+8]]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+New Ways
+
+
+"WHAT," we ask with anxious gravity, "what is the best sort of teaching
+for children?" One might as sanely ask what is the best sort of
+spectacles for men, or the best size in gloves for women. And the blind
+coarse generalisation which underlies that question is the very heart
+and core of the muddled, musty maze we call education. We talk of the
+best sort of education for children, as we might talk of the best sort
+of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment for mice. Stoves are
+all alike, they vary in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is as
+the iron soul of the other. The polish that is good for one is good for
+all. Mice may, and do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood does not
+vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the inner nature, in the soul and
+self of it, each child is different from any other child, and the
+education that treats children as a class and not as individual human
+beings is the education whose failure is bringing our civilisation
+about our ears even as we speak.
+
+Each child is an explorer in a new country--an explorer with its own
+special needs and curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the
+explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths. The little free wild
+creatures would seek their meat from God: we round them into herds, pen
+them in folds, and feed them with artificial foods--drab flat oil cakes
+all alike, not considering that for some brown nuts and red berries, and
+for some the new clean green grass, may be the bread of life.
+
+Or, if you take the mind of a child to be a garden wherein flowers grow
+that might be trained to beauty, you bring along your steam-roller, and
+crush everything to a flat field where you may grow cabbages. It is so
+good for the field, you say--because you like cabbages.
+
+Liberty is one of the rights we claim for ourselves, though God knows we
+get little enough of it and use still less; and Liberty is one of the
+rights that a child above all needs--every possible liberty, of thought,
+of word, of deed. The old systems of education seem to have found it
+good to coerce a child for the simple sake of coercion--to make it do
+what the master chose, to make it leave undone those things which it
+wished to do and to do those things which it did not wish to do--nay,
+more, wished violently and conclusively not to do. To force the choice
+of the teacher on the child, to override the timid natural impulses of
+the child with the hard hoofs of the teacher's individuality, to crush
+out all initiative, to force the young supple mind into a mould, to lop
+the budding branches, nip off the sensitive seeking tendrils, to batter
+down the child's will by the brute force of the grown-up will, to "break
+the child's spirit," as the cursed phrase used to run--this was, in
+effect, what education meant. There was a picture in _Punch_, I
+remember--at least I have forgotten the picture, but I remember the
+legend: "Cissy, go and see what Bobbie's doing, and tell him not to."
+
+It did not much matter what you made a child do, so long as it was
+something against the grain. He was to learn, not what he with his
+wonderful new curiosities and aptitudes longed to learn, but what you
+wished to teach; you with your dulled senses--dulled in the same bitter
+school as that in which he was now a sad learner.
+
+[Illustration: NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE.]
+
+Generation after generation has gone on, pounding away at the old silly
+game, each generation anxious and eager to hurt the new one as it, in
+its time, was hurt. Each generation must, one would have thought, have
+remembered what things hurt children and how much these things hurt, and
+yet this intolerable cycle of bullying and punishment and repression
+went on and on and on. Children were bullied and broken--and grew up to
+bully and break in their turn. It must be that this was because the
+grown-ups did not remember. Those who have the care of children, who
+work for them, who teach them, should be those who do remember: those
+who have not forgotten what it feels like to be a child--any sort of
+child. For, though children are all different, there is a common measure
+among them as there is among men. A law for men cannot be good if it be
+made--as indeed but too often happens--by those who have forgotten what
+it used to feel like to be a man; and what sort of poetry do you get
+from one who has forgotten beauty and sorrow, and the Spring, and how it
+feels to be young and a lover? And if the people who have the care of
+children have forgotten what it feels like to be a child, those who do
+remember should remind them. They should be reminded how it feels to be
+not so very much higher than the table, how it feels not to be so clever
+as you are now, and so much more interested in so much more--how it
+feels to believe in things and in people as you did when you were new to
+the journey of life--to explore every road you came to, to trust every
+person you met. It is a long time ago, but can you not remember the days
+when right and wrong were as different as milk and mud, when you knew
+that it was really wrong to be naughty and really good to be good, when
+you felt that your mother could do no wrong and that your father was the
+noblest and bravest of men? Do you remember the world of small and new
+and joyous and delightful things? Try to remember it if you would know
+how to help a child instead of hindering it--try to look at the world
+with the clear, clean eyes that once were yours in the days when you had
+never read a newspaper or deceived a friend. You will then be able to
+see again certain ideals, unclouded and radiant, which the dust of the
+crowded highway and the smears of getting-on have dimmed and
+distorted--quite simple ideals of love, faith, unselfishness, honour,
+truth. I know these words are often enough on the lips of all of us, but
+a child's ear will be able to tell whether the words spring from the
+lips or the heart. Look back, and you will see that you yourself were
+also able to distinguish these things--once.
+
+Education as it should be, the unfolding of a flower, not the distorting
+of it, is only possible to those who are willing and able themselves to
+become as little children.
+
+It is because certain great spirits have done this and have tried to
+teach others to do it, that reforms in education have begun to be at
+least possible. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Signora Montessori and many a
+lesser star has shone upon a new path. And public interest has centred
+more and more on the welfare of the child. Books are written, societies
+formed, newspapers founded in the interests of the child, and true
+education becomes a possibility.
+
+And well indeed it is for us that this is so. For the education of the
+last three hundred years has led, in all things vital and spiritual,
+downhill all the way. We have gone on frustrating natural human
+intelligences and emotions, inculcating false doctrines, and choking
+with incoherent facts the souls which asked to be fed with
+dreams-come-true--till now our civilisation is a thing we cannot look at
+without a mental and moral nausea. We have, in our countrysides,
+peasants too broken for rebellion, in our cities.
+
+    The mortal sickness of a mind
+    Too unhappy to be kind.
+
+If ever we are to be able to look ourselves and each other in the face
+again it will be because a new generation has arisen in whose ears the
+voice of God and His angels has not ceased to sound. If only we would
+see the things that belong to our peace, and lead the children instead
+of driving them, who knows what splendid thoughts and actions they in
+their natural development might bring to the salvation of the world?
+
+In the Palace of Education which the great minds have designed and are
+designing, many stones will be needed--and so I bring the little stone I
+have hewn out and tried to shape, in the hope that it may fit into a
+corner of that great edifice. For if anything is to be done, it is
+necessary that all who have anything to give, shall give it. As Francis
+Bacon said:
+
+"Nothing can so much conduce to the drawing down, as it were, from
+heaven a whole shower of new and profitable Inventions, as this, that
+the experiments of many . . . may come to the knowledge of one man, or
+some few, who by mutual conference may whet and sharpen one another, so
+that by this . . . Arts may flourish, and as it were by a commixture and
+communication of Rays, inflame one another. . . . This sagacity by
+literate experience may in the mean project and scatter for the benefit
+of man many rudiments to knowledge which may be had at hand."
+
+And that is why I have left for a little while the telling of stories
+and set myself to write down something of what I know about
+children--know by the grace of memory and by the dreams of childhood, to
+me, thank God, persistent and imperishable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Playthings
+
+
+THE prime instinct of a child at play--I do not mean a child at
+games--is to create. I use the word confidently. He will make as well as
+create, if you let him, but always he will create: he will use the whole
+force of dream and fancy to create something out of nothing--over and
+beyond what he will make out of such materials as he has to hand. The
+five-year-old will lay a dozen wooden bricks and four cotton reels
+together, set a broken cup on the top of them, and tell you it is a
+steam-engine. And it is. He has created the engine which he sees, and
+you don't see, and the pile of bricks and cotton reels is the symbol of
+his creation. He will silently borrow your best scissors and cut a
+serrated band of newspaper, which he will fasten round his head (with
+your best brooch, if he cannot find a pin), hang another newspaper from
+his shoulders, and sit in state holding the hearth-brush. He will tell
+you that he is a king--and he is. He has created crown, robes, sceptre,
+and kingship. The paper and the rest of it are but symbols.
+
+[Illustration: HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE.]
+
+And you shall observe that the toys which the child loves best are
+always those toys which lend themselves to such symbolic use.
+
+[Illustration: THE TOMB IN THE DESERT.
+
+18]]
+
+Christmas is at hand. You go to buy gifts for the child, in memory of
+that Other Child whose birthday gifts were gold, frankincense, and
+myrrh. You go into the toyshops, elbowing your way as best you can,
+looking for such toys as may aid the child in his work of creative
+imagination.
+
+You find a vast mass and litter and jumble of incredible
+futilities--things made to sell, things made by people who have
+forgotten what it is like to be a child. Mechanical toys of all sorts,
+stupid toys, toys that will only do one thing, and that thing vulgar and
+foolish. And, worst outrage of all, ugly toys, monstrosities,
+deformities, lead devils, grinning humpbacked clowns, "comic" dogs and
+cats, hideous mis-shapen pigs, incredible negroes, intolerable
+golliwogs. All such things the natural child, with a child's decent
+detestation of deformity, will thrust from it with screams of fear and
+hatred, till the materialistic mother or nurse explains that the horror
+is not really, as the child knows it to be, horrible and unnatural, but
+"funny." Thus do we outrage the child's inborn sense of beauty, which is
+also the sense of health and fitness, and teach it that deformity is not
+shocking, not pitiable even, but just "funny." All these ugly toys are
+impossible as aids to clean imagination.
+
+So, almost in as great, though not in so harmful a degree, is the
+"character doll." The old doll was a doll, and not a character.
+Therefore she could assume any character at your choice. The character
+doll is Baby Willy, and can never be anything else, unless imagination,
+exasperated and baffled, christens him Silly Billy in the moment of
+furious projection across the nursery floor. But the old doll, with her
+good, expressionless face and clear blue eyes, could be a duchess or a
+dairymaid, a captive princess or a greengrocer's wife keeping shop, a
+cruel stepmother or Joan of Arc. I beg you to try Baby Willy in the
+character of Joan of Arc.
+
+You cannot hope to understand children by common-sense, by reason, by
+logic, nor by any science whatsoever. You cannot understand them by
+imagination--not even by love itself. There is only one way: to remember
+what you thought and felt and liked and hated when you yourself were a
+child. Not what you know now--or think you know--you ought to have
+thought and liked, but what you did then, in stark fact, like and think.
+There is no other way.
+
+Do you remember the toys you liked, the toys you played with? Do you
+remember the toys you hated--after the fading of the first day's flush
+of novelty, of possession? The houses with doors that wouldn't open? The
+stables with horses that wouldn't stand up? The shops whose goods were
+part of their painted shelves, whose shopmen were as fast glued behind
+the counter as any live shop-assistant before the passing of the Shops
+Act?
+
+And the mechanical toys--the clockwork toys. The engine was all right,
+even after the clockwork ran down for the last time with that inexorable
+whizz which told you all was over; you could build tunnels with the big
+brown books in the library and push the engine through with your
+hand--it would run quite a long way out on the other side. But the other
+clockwork things! How can one love and pet a mouse, no matter how furry
+its superficial exterior, when underneath, where its soft waistcoat and
+its little feet should be, there is only a hard surface from which
+incompetent wheels protrude? And the ostrich who draws a hansom cab, and
+the man who beats the boy with a stick? When they have whizzed their
+last, who cares for the tin relics outliving their detestable
+activities?
+
+Think of the toys you liked: the Noah's Ark--full of characters. What
+stirring dramas of the chase, what sporting incidents, what domestic and
+agricultural operations could be carried out with that most royal of
+toys. Mr. Noah, I remember, was equally competent and convincing as
+ploughman or carter. But his chief rôle was Sitting Bull. His sons were
+inimitable as Chingachgook and scalp hunters generally. You cannot play
+scalp hunters with the mechanical ostrich indissolubly welded to a
+hansom cab.
+
+[Illustration: STONEHENGE.]
+
+You loved your bricks, I think, especially if you lived in the days when
+bricks were of well-seasoned oak, heavy, firm, exactly proportioned,
+before the boxes of inexact light deal bricks, with the one painted
+glass window, began to be made in Germany. How finely those great bricks
+stood for Stonehenge, and how submissively Anna, the Dutch doll, whose
+arms and legs were gone, played the part of the Sacrifice. If you
+remember those bricks you will remember the polished, white wooden dairy
+sets in oval white boxes--churns and tubs and kettles and pots all
+neatly and beautifully turned. You will remember the doll's house
+furniture, rosewood, duly mitred and dovetailed, fine cabinet-makers'
+work, little beautiful models of beautiful things. Now the dolls' house
+furniture is glued together. You can't trust a light-weight china doll
+to sit on the kitchen chairs. . . . But you can get your mechanical
+ostrich and your golliwog. . . .
+
+Children in towns are cut off, at least for most of the year, from the
+splendid and ever-varying possibilities of clay and mud and sand,
+oak-apples and snow-berries, acorn-cups and seaweed, shells and sticks
+and stones which serve and foster the creative instinct, the thousand
+adjuncts to that play which is dream and reality in one.
+
+For them, even more than for the happier country children, it is good to
+choose toys which shall possess, above and before all, the one supreme
+quality of a good toy. Let it be a toy that is not merely itself, like
+the ostrich of whom I hope you are now as weary as I, but a toy that can
+be, at need, other things. A toy, in fine, that your child can, in the
+fullest and most satisfying sense, play with.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Imagination
+
+
+TO the child, from the beginning, life is the unfolding of one vast
+mystery; to him our stalest commonplaces are great news, our dullest
+facts prismatic wonders. To the baby who has never seen a red ball, a
+red ball is a marvel, new and magnificent as ever the golden apples were
+to Hercules.
+
+You show the child many things, all strange, all entrancing; it sees, it
+hears, it touches; it learns to co-ordinate sight and touch and hearing.
+You tell it tales of the things it cannot see and hear and touch, of men
+"that it may never meet, of lands that it shall never see"; strange
+black and brown and yellow people whose dress is not the dress of mother
+or nurse--strange glowing yellow lands where the sun burns like fire,
+and flowers grow that are not like the flowers in the fields at home.
+You tell it that the stars, which look like pin-holes in the floor of
+heaven, are really great lonely worlds, millions of miles away; that
+the earth, which the child can see for itself to be flat, is really
+round; that nuts fall from the trees because of the force of
+gravitation, and not, as reason would suggest, merely because there is
+nothing to hold them up. And the child believes; it believes all the
+seeming miracles.
+
+Then you tell it of other things no more miraculous and no less; of
+fairies, and dragons, and enchantments, of spells and magic, of flying
+carpets and invisible swords. The child believes in these wonders
+likewise. Why not? If very big men live in Patagonia, why should not
+very little men live in flower-bells? If electricity can move unseen
+through the air, why not carpets? The child's memory becomes a
+store-house of beautiful and wonderful things which are or have been in
+the visible universe, or in that greater universe, the mind of man. Life
+will teach the child, soon enough, to distinguish between the two.
+
+But there are those who are not as you and I. These say that all the
+enchanting fairy romances are lies, that nothing is real that cannot be
+measured or weighed, seen or heard or handled. Such make their idols of
+stocks and stones, and are blind and deaf to the things of the spirit.
+These hard-fingered materialists crush the beautiful butterfly wings of
+imagination, insisting that pork and pews and public-houses are more
+real than poetry; that a looking-glass is more real than love, a viper
+than valour. These Gradgrinds give to the children the stones which they
+call facts, and deny to the little ones the daily bread of dreams.
+
+Of the immeasurable value of imagination as a means to the development
+of the loveliest virtues, to the uprooting of the ugliest and meanest
+sins, there is here no space to speak. But the gain in sheer happiness
+is more quickly set forth. Imagination, duly fostered and trained, is to
+the world of visible wonder and beauty what the inner light is to the
+Japanese lantern. It transfigures everything into a glory that is only
+not magic to us because we know Who kindled the inner light, Who set up
+for us the splendid lantern of this world.
+
+[Illustration: THE TREE LIKE A MAN.]
+
+But Mr. Gradgrind prefers the lantern unlighted. Material facts are good
+enough for him. Until it comes to religion. And then, suddenly, the
+child who has been forbidden to believe in Jack the Giant Killer must
+believe in Goliath and David. There are no fairies, but you must believe
+that there are angels. The magic sword and the magic buckler are
+nonsense, but the child must not have any doubts about the breastplate
+of righteousness and the sword of the Spirit. What spiritual reaction do
+you expect when, after denying all the symbolic stories and legends, you
+suddenly confront your poor little Materialist with the Most Wonderful
+Story in the world?
+
+If I had my way, children should be taught no facts unless they asked
+for them. Heaven knows they ask questions enough. They should just be
+taught the old wonder-stories, and learn their facts through these. Who
+wants to know about pumpkins until he has heard Cinderella? Why not tell
+the miracle of Jonah first, and let the child ask about the natural
+history of the whale afterwards, if he cares to hear it?
+
+And one of the greatest helps to a small, inexperienced traveller in
+this sometimes dusty way is the likeness of things to each other. Your
+piece of thick bread and butter is a little stale, perhaps, and bores
+you; but, when you see that your first three bites have shaped it to the
+likeness of a bear or a beaver, dull teatime becomes interesting at
+once. A cloud that is like a face, a tree that is like an old man, a
+hill that is like an elephant's back, if you have things like these to
+look at, and look out for, how short the long walk becomes.
+
+[Illustration: POPPY DOLL.]
+
+And in the garden, when the columbine is a circle of doves, with spread
+wings and beaks that touch, when the foxglove flower is a little Puck's
+hat which will fit on your finger, when the snapdragon is not just a
+snapdragon, but a dragon that will snap, and the poppies can be made
+into dolls with black woolly hair and grass sashes--how the enchantment
+of the garden grows. The child will be all the more ready to hear about
+the seed vessels of the columbine when he has seen the doves, and the
+pollen of the poppy will have a double interest for her who has played
+with the woolly-haired dolls. Imagination gives to the child a world
+transfigured; let us leave it that radiant mystery for the little time
+that is granted.
+
+[Illustration: DOVES AND DRAGON.]
+
+I know a child whose parents are sad because she does not love
+arithmetic and history, but rather the beautiful dreams which the
+Gradgrinds call nonsense. Here are the verses I wrote for that child:
+
+FOR DOLLY
+
+WHO DOES NOT LEARN HER LESSONS
+
+    You see the fairies dancing in the fountain,
+      Laughing, leaping, sparkling with the spray.
+    You see the gnomes, at work beneath the mountain,
+      Make gold and silver and diamonds every day.
+    You see the angels, sliding down the moonbeams,
+      Bring white dreams, like sheaves of lilies fair.
+    You see the imps scarce seen against the noonbeams,
+      Rise from the bonfire's blue and liquid air.
+
+    All the enchantment, all the magic there is
+      Hid in trees and blossoms, to you is plain and true.
+    Dewdrops in lupin leaves are jewels for the fairies;
+      Every flower that blows is a miracle for you.
+    Air, earth, water, fire, spread their splendid wares for you.
+      Millions of magics beseech your little looks;
+    Every soul your winged soul meets, loves you and cares for you.
+      Ah! why must we clip those wings and dim those eyes with books?
+
+    Soon, soon enough, the magic lights grow dimmer,
+      Marsh mists arise to veil the radiant sky.
+    Dust of hard highways will veil the starry glimmer;
+      Tired hands will lay the folded magic by.
+    Storm winds will blow through those enchanted closes,
+      Fairies be crushed where weed and briar grow strong. . . .
+    Leave her her crown of magic stars and roses,
+      Leave her her kingdom--she will not keep it long!
+
+[Illustration: THE ASTROLOGER'S TOWER.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Of Taking Root
+
+
+WHEN the history of our time comes to be written, it may be that the
+historian, remarking our many faults and weaknesses, and seeking to find
+a reason for them, speculating on our civilisation as we now speculate
+on the civilisations of Rome and Egypt, will come to see that the poor
+blossoms of civic virtue which we put forth owe their meagreness and
+deformity to the fact that our lives are no longer permitted to take
+root in material possessions. Material possessions indeed we have--too
+much of them and too many of them--but they are rather a dust that
+overlays the leaves of life than a soil in which the roots of life can
+grow.
+
+A certain solidness of character, a certain quiet force and confidence
+grow up naturally in the man who lives all his life in one house, grows
+all the flowers of his life in one garden. To plant a tree and know that
+if you live and tend it, you will gather fruit from it; that if you set
+out a thorn-hedge, it will be a fine thing when your little son has
+grown to be a man--these are pleasures which none but the very rich can
+now know. (And the rich who might enjoy these pleasures prefer to run
+about the country in motor cars.) That is why, for ordinary people, the
+word "neighbour" is ceasing to have any meaning. The man who occupies
+the villa partially detached from your own is not your neighbour. He
+only moved in a month or so ago, and you yourself will probably not be
+there next year. A house now is a thing to live in, not to love; and a
+neighbour a person to criticise, but not to befriend.
+
+[Illustration: THE SILVER TOWERS.]
+
+When people's lives were rooted in their houses and their gardens they
+were also rooted in their other possessions. And these possessions were
+thoughtfully chosen and carefully tended. You bought furniture to live
+with, and for your children to live with after you. You became familiar
+with it--it was adorned with memories, brightened with hopes; it, like
+your house and your garden, assumed then a warm friendliness of intimate
+individuality. In those days if you wanted to be smart, you bought a new
+carpet and curtains: now you "refurnish the drawing-room." If you have
+to move house, as you often do, it seems cheaper to sell most of your
+furniture and buy other, than it is to remove it, especially if the
+moving is caused by a rise of fortune.
+
+[Illustration: FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH.]
+
+I do not attempt to explain it, but there is a certain quality in men
+who have taken root, who have lived with the same furniture, the same
+house, the same friends for many years, which you shall look for in
+vain in men who have travelled the world over and met hundreds of
+acquaintances. For you do not know a man by meeting him at an hotel, any
+more than you know a house by calling at it, or know a garden by walking
+along its paths. The knowledge of human nature of the man who has taken
+root may be narrow, but it will be deep. The unrooted man who lives in
+hotels and changes his familiars with his houses, will have a shallow
+familiarity with the veneer of acquaintances; he will not have learned
+to weigh and balance the inner worth of a friend.
+
+In the same way I take it that a constant succession of new clothes is
+irritating and unsettling, especially to women. It fritters away the
+attention and exacerbates their natural frivolity. In other days when
+clothes were expensive, women bought few clothes, but those clothes were
+meant to last, and they did last. A silk dress often outlived the
+natural life of its first wearer. The knowledge that the question of
+dress will not be one to be almost weekly settled tends to calm the
+nerves and consolidate the character. Clothes are very cheap
+now--therefore women buy many new dresses, and throw the shoddy things
+away when, as they soon do, they grow shabby. Men are far more
+sensible. Every man knows the appeal of an old coat. So long as women
+are insensible to the appeal of an old gown, they need never hope to be
+considered, in stability of character, the equals of men.
+
+The passion for ornaments--not ornament--is another of the unsettling
+factors in an unsettling age. The very existence of the "fancy shop" is
+not only a menace to, but an attack on the quiet dignity in the home.
+The hundreds of ugly, twisted, bizarre fancy articles which replace the
+old few serious "ornaments" are all so many tokens of the spirit of
+unrest which is born of, and in turn bears, our modern civilisation.
+
+It is not, alas! presently possible for us as a nation to return to that
+calmer, more dignified state when the lives of men were rooted in their
+individual possessions, possessions adorned with memories of the past
+and cherished as legacies to the future. But I wish I could persuade
+women to buy good gowns and grow fond of them, to buy good chairs and
+tables, and to refrain from the orgy of the fancy shop. So much of life,
+of thought, of energy, of temper is taken up with the continual change
+of dress, house, furniture, ornaments, such a constant twittering of
+nerves goes on about all these things which do not matter. And the
+children, seeing their mother's gnat-like restlessness, themselves, in
+turn, seek change, not of ideas or of adjustments, but of possessions.
+Consider the acres of rubbish specially designed for children and spread
+out over the counters of countless toy-shops. Trivial, unsatisfying
+things, the fruit of a perverse and intense commercial ingenuity: things
+made to sell, and not to use.
+
+When the child's birthday comes, relations send him presents--give him
+presents, and his nursery is littered with a fresh array of undesirable
+imbecilities--to make way for which the last harvest of the same empty
+husks is thrust aside in the bottom of the toy cupboard. And in a couple
+of days most of the flimsy stuff is broken, and the child is weary to
+death of it all. If he has any real toys, he will leave the glittering
+trash for nurse to put away and go back to those real toys.
+
+When I was a child in the nursery we had--there were three of us--a
+large rocking horse, a large doll's house (with a wooden box as annexe),
+a Noah's Ark, dinner and tea things, a great chest of oak bricks, and a
+pestle and mortar. I cannot remember any other toys that pleased us.
+Dolls came and went, but they were not toys, they were characters, and
+now and then something of a clockwork nature strayed our way--to be
+broken up and disembowelled to meet the mechanical needs of the moment.
+I remember a desperate hour when I found that the walking doll from
+Paris had clockwork under her crinoline, and could not be comfortably
+taken to bed. I had a black-and-white china rabbit who was hard enough,
+in all conscience, but then he never pretended to be anything but a
+china rabbit, and I bought him with my own penny at Sandhurst Fair. He
+slept with me for seven or eight years, and when he was lost, with my
+play-box and the rest of its loved contents, on the journey from France
+to England, all the dignity of my thirteen years could not uphold me in
+that tragedy.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that children are naturally fond of change.
+They love what they know. In strange places they suffer violently from
+home-sickness, even when their loved nurse or mother is with them. They
+want to get back to the house they know, the toys they know, the books
+they know. And the loves of children for their toys, especially the ones
+they take to bed with them, should be scrupulously respected. Children
+nowadays have insanitary, dusty Teddy Bears. I had a "rag doll," but
+she was stuffed with hair, and was washed once a fortnight, after which
+nurse put in her features again with a quill pen, and consoled me for
+any change in her expression by explaining that she was "growing up." My
+little son had a soap-stone mouse, and has it still.
+
+The fewer toys a child has the more he will value them; and it is
+important that a child should value his toys if he is to begin to get
+out of them their _full_ value. If his choice of objects be limited, he
+will use his imagination and ingenuity in making the objects available
+serve the purposes of such plays as he has in hand. Also it is well to
+remember that the supplementing of a child's own toys by other things,
+_lent for a time_, has considerable educational value. The child will
+learn quite easily that the difference between his and yours is not a
+difference between the attainable and the unattainable, but between the
+constant possession and the occasional possession. He will also learn to
+take care of the things which are lent to him, and, if he sees that you
+respect his possessions, will respect yours all the more in that some of
+them are, now and then, for a time and in a sense, his.
+
+[Illustration: THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE.]
+
+40]
+
+The generosity of aunts, uncles, and relations generally should be
+kindly but firmly turned into useful channels. The purchase of "fancy"
+things should be sternly discouraged.
+
+With the rocking horse, the bricks, the doll's house, the cart or
+wheel-barrow, the tea and dinner set, the Noah's Ark and the puzzle
+maps, the nursery will be rudimentarily equipped. The supplementary
+equipment can be added as it is needed, not by the sporadic outbursts of
+unclish extravagance, but by well-considered and slow degrees, and by
+means in which the child participates. For we must never forget that the
+child loves, both in imagination and in fact, to create. All his dreams,
+his innocent pretendings and make-believes, will help his nature to
+unfold, and his hands in their clumsy efforts will help the dreams,
+which in turn will help the little hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Beauty and Knowledge
+
+
+CLEVER young people find it amusing to sneer at the old-fashioned ideal
+of combining instruction with amusement--a stupid Victorian ideal, we
+are told, which a progressive generation has cast aside. Too hastily,
+perhaps--too inconsiderately. "Work while you work and play while you
+play" is a motto dealing with a big question, and one to which there are
+at least two sides. Entirely to divorce amusement and instruction--may
+not this tend to make the one dull and the other silly? In this, as in
+some other matters, our generation might well learn a little from its
+ancestors. In many ways no doubt we have far surpassed the simple ideals
+of our forefathers, but in the matter of amusements, in the matter of
+beauty, in the matter of teaching children things without boring them,
+or giving powders really and truly concealed in jam--have we advanced so
+much?
+
+To begin with, the world is much uglier than it was. At least England
+is, and France, and Belgium, and Italy, and I do not suppose that
+Germany, so far ahead of us with airships, is far behind in the ugliness
+which seems to be, with the airship, the hall-mark of a really advanced
+nation.
+
+We are proud, and justly, of the enormous advances made in the last
+sixty years in education, sanitation, and all the complicated and heavy
+machinery of the other 'ations, the 'ologies, and the 'isms; but in
+these other matters how is it with us? We have grown uglier, and the
+things which amuse no longer teach.
+
+For a good many years now--more than three hundred--old men have said
+"Such things and such were better in our time." And always the young
+have disbelieved the saying, which in due course came from their own
+lips. Has it ever occurred to any one that the reason why old people say
+this is quite the simplest of all reasons? They say it because it is
+_true_, and true in our land in quite a special manner. The chariot
+wheels of advancing civilisation must always furrow some green fields,
+grind some fair flowers in the dust. But the chariot wheels in which
+civilisation to-day advances grows less and less like a chariot and more
+and more like a steam-roller, and unless we steer better there will
+very soon be few flowers left to us.
+
+Those of us who have reached middle age already see that the old men
+spoke truly. Things are not what they were. Without dealing with frauds
+and adulterations and shoddy of all sorts we can see that things are not
+so good as they were, nor yet so beautiful.
+
+And I do not think that this means just that we are growing old, and
+that the fingers of Time have rubbed the bloom from the fruit of Life.
+Because those things which must be now as they used to be, trees,
+leaves, rivers, and the laughter of little children, flowers, the sea at
+those points where piers are impracticable, and mountains--the ones
+stony and steep enough to resist the jerry-builder and the funicular
+railway--still hold all, and more than all, their old magic and delight.
+
+It seems that it is not only that the ugly and unmeaning things have
+grown, like a filthy fungus, over the sheer beauty of the world, but
+that the things that people mean to be beautiful are not beautiful, and
+the things they mean to be interesting lack interest.
+
+And the disease is universal: it attacks new things as well as old. The
+cinematographs even, newest of the new, as things went in the old
+world; already the canker has eaten them up. In the first year of
+Picture Palaces we all crowded to see beautiful pictures of beautiful
+places: Niagara, the Zambesi Falls, the Grand Cańon. The comic pieces
+were perhaps French, but they were certainly funny. Also we saw the way
+the world lived, when it was the other side of the world: "Elephants
+a-piling teak," naked savages, or as near naked as don't matter, moving
+in ceremonial dance before the idols that were the gods of their deep
+dangerous faith. Dramas of love and death and pity and poverty. Quite
+often in the early days the cinematograph tale was of some workman
+driven by want to the theft of a loaf. It is true that the story
+generally ended in his conviction and the adoption of his charming baby
+girl by the wife of the _Juge d'Instruction_, but all the same people
+saw some one poor and sad and tempted, and were sorry and sad for his
+sake. Also we had tales of Indians with men that rode amain, and horses
+that one longed to bestride, such beauties they were, all fire and
+delicate strong temperament. War dramas too there were, where the hero
+left his sweetheart, and turned coward perhaps, redeeming himself with
+magnificent completeness in the splendid _débâcle_ of a forlorn hope.
+That is all over. Already the sordid, heavy hand that smears commercial
+commonplace on all the bright facets of romance has obscured the vivid
+possibilities of the cinematograph. We have now for fun the elaborate
+hurting of one American person by another American person; for scenery,
+American flat-iron buildings; for romance the incredibly unimportant
+emotions of fleshy American actresses and actors. There are two girls,
+good and bad; two men, bad and good. In the end the good man gets the
+good girl, which is, of course, as it should be, or would be if we could
+believe in any moral quality in these fat-faced impersonators. You don't
+care a bit who wins, but none the less, the four of them mouth and mop
+and mow and make faces at you through five interminable acts, and when
+the good young man marries the good young woman in a parlour grossly
+furnished according to American ideals, you feel that both of them are
+well punished for their unpardonable existence. All real and delicate
+romance has, we observe, been wiped out by the cinematograph.
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED]
+
+It has long been the fashion to sneer at the Crystal Palace, and indeed
+the poor dear has gone from bad to worse. There are exhibitions there
+all exactly like all other exhibitions: Switch-backs, _Montagnes
+Russes_, Silhouettes, Tumble-scumbles, Weary waves, Threepenny thrills
+(where you hustle against strangers and shriek at the impact). But once
+the Crystal Palace was otherwise. In the Victorian days we sneer at,
+when our fathers could not see that there was any quarrel between
+knowledge and beauty, both of whom they loved, they built the Crystal
+Palace as a Temple vowed to these twin Deities of their worship. Think
+what the Crystal Palace was then. Think what its authors intended it to
+be. Think what, for a little time, it was. A place of beauty, a place
+where beauty and knowledge went hand in hand. It is quite true that a
+Brobdingnagian Conservatory does not seem so beautiful to us as it did
+to the Prince Consort and Sir Joseph Paxton. It is true that even in the
+palmiest days of the Crystal Palace you barked your shins over iron
+girders--painted a light blue, my memory assures me--and that the boards
+of the flooring were so far apart that you could lose, down the cracks
+of them, not only your weekly sixpence or your birthday shilling, but
+even the sudden unexpected cartwheel (do they still call a crown that?)
+contributed by an uncle almost more than human. It is true that the
+gravel of the paths in the "grounds" tired your feet and tried your
+temper, and that the adventure ended in a clinging to bony fingers and
+admonitions from nurse "not to drag so." But on the other hand. . . .
+
+Think of the imagination, the feeling for romance that went to the
+furnishing of the old Crystal Palace. There was a lake in the grounds of
+Penge Park. How would our twentieth century _entrepreneurs_ deal with a
+lake? We need not pause to invent an answer. We know it would be
+something new and nasty. How did these despised mid-Victorians deal with
+it? They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in
+that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world. On a great
+stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his vast wings spread for flight. A
+mammoth sloth embraced a tree, and I give you my word that when you came
+on him from behind, you, in your six years, could hardly believe that he
+was not real, that he would not presently leave the tree and turn his
+attention to your bloused and belted self. (Little boys wore caps with
+peaks then, and blouses with embroidered collars.) Convinced, at last,
+by the cold feel of his flank to your fat little hand, that he was but
+stone, you kept, none the less, a memory of him that would last your
+life, and make his name, when you met it in a book, as thrilling as the
+name of a friend in the list of birthday honours. There was an
+Ichthyosaurus too, and another chap whose name I forget, but he had a
+scalloped crest all down his back to the end of his tail. And the
+Dinosaurus . . . he had a round hole in his antediluvian stomach: and,
+with a brother--his own turn to come next, as in honour bound--to give
+you a leg-up, you could explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur with
+feelings hardly to be surpassed by those of bandits in a cave. It is
+almost impossible to over-estimate the Dinosaurus as an educational
+influence. On your way back to the Palace itself you passed Water
+Temples surrounded by pools where water-lilies grew. Afterwards, when
+you read of tanks and lotuses and India, you knew what to think.
+
+There were Sphinxes--the correct plural was told you by aunts, and you
+rejected it on the terrace--and, within, more smooth water with marble
+at the edge and more lilies, and goldfish, palms, and ferns, and humming
+pervasive music from the organ. There were groves or shrubberies; you
+entered them a-tremble with a fearful joy. You knew that round the next
+corner or the next would be black and brown and yellow men; savages,
+with their huts and their wives and their weapons, their
+looking-glass-pools and their reed tunics, so near you that it was only
+a step across a little barrier and you could pretend that you also were
+a black, a brown, or a yellow person, and not a little English child in
+a tunic, belt, and peaked cap. You never took the step, but none the
+less those savages were your foes and your friends, and when you met
+them in your geography you thrilled to the encounter.
+
+Further, there were Courts; I first met Venus, the armless wonder of
+Milo, and Hermes, embodied vision of Praxiteles, and the Discobolus,
+whom we all love, and who is exactly like Mr. Graham Wallas in youth, in
+the Grecian Court. In the Egyptian Court there were pictured pillars,
+and the very word Egypt is to me for their sake a Word of Power to this
+day. And the Spanish Court, the court of the Alhambra, the lovely
+mosaic, the gold and the blue and the red, the fountain, the marble, the
+strange unnatural beauty of the horseshoe arches. . . .
+
+I shall never see the Alhambra now, but it is because of the Spanish
+Court at the Crystal Palace that there will always be an empty ache in
+my thought, an ache of the heart, a longing that is not all pain, at its
+name, a feeling like a beautiful dwarf despair, in that I never shall
+see that blue and red and golden glory, and the mystery of its strange
+mis-shapen arches that open to the whole world of dreams.
+
+Say of the Mid-Victorians what you will; they did at least know, when
+they set them, the seeds of Romance. Think of Euston Station: those
+glorious pillars, the magnificent dream of an Egyptian building to loom
+through the Egyptian darkness of London's fogs. And the architecture of
+Egypt was too expensive, and Euston remains, a magnificent memorial--the
+child of genius stunted by finance.
+
+There was Madame Tussaud's too, a close link with the French Revolution:
+the waxen heads of kings and democrats, the very guillotine itself. And
+Madame Tussaud's daughter, with the breathing breast that seemed alive,
+and the little old woman in the black bonnet, Madame herself, who had
+seen the rise of Republics and the deaths of kings. These things, last
+time I trod those halls, were put in the shade, their place usurped by
+vulgar tableaux, explaining to the bored spectators what happens to a
+vulgar young man with a wife whose skirt is much too short in front and
+her hair very badly done, if he leaves his home for the society of
+sirens and cardsharpers. The tableaux were cheap and nasty, and taught
+one nothing that one could not learn from the _Police News_.
+
+Once there were nightingales that sang in the gardens on Loampit Hill.
+Now it is all villas. Once the Hilly Fields were hilly fields where the
+children played, and there were primroses. Once the road from Eltham to
+Woolwich was a grassy lane with hedges and big trees in the hedges, and
+wild pinks and Bethlehem stars, and ragged robin and campion. Now the
+trees are cut down and there are no more flowers. It is asphalt all the
+way, and here and there seats divided by iron rods so that tired tramps
+should not sleep on them. And the green fields by Mottingham where the
+kingcups used to grow, and the willows by the little stream, they are
+eaten up by yellow caterpillars of streets all alike, all horrible;
+while in London old handsome houses are tenements, and children play on
+the dirty doorsteps of them with dead mice and mutton bones for toys. In
+the country women wear men's tweed caps instead of sunbonnets, and
+Hinde's curlers by day instead of curl papers (which if you were pretty,
+looked like wreaths of white roses) by night. And everything is getting
+uglier and uglier. And no one seems to care. And only the old people
+remember that things were not always ugly, remember how different
+things were--once.
+
+[Illustration: A CHINESE TEMPLE.]
+
+Therefore I would plead with all those who have to do with children to
+resist and to denounce uglification wherever they may meet with it, and
+to remember that there is knowledge which goes hand in hand with beauty.
+To show a child beautiful things, and to answer as well all the
+questions he will ask about them, to charm and thrill his imagination
+with pictures and statues and models of the wonders of the world, to
+familiarise the child with beauty, so that he knows ugliness when he
+meets it, and hates it for the outrage it is to the beauty he has known
+and loved ever since he was very little--this is worth doing. If we
+would make beauty the dear rule of a man's life, and ugliness the hated
+exception, we should make beauty as familiar to the child as the air he
+breathes, and if we associate knowledge with beauty the child will love
+them both.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Of Building and Other Matters
+
+
+A MOMENT of rapturous anticipation lights life when the kind aunt or
+uncle has given the bricks, when the flat, sliding lid has been slipped
+back, and the smooth wooden cubes and oblongs have tumbled resoundingly
+on table or floor.
+
+"I am going to build a palace," says the child. Or a tower or a church.
+And, the highest hopes inspiring him, he sets out on the new adventure.
+But he does not build a palace or a church, or even a railway station.
+What he builds is a factory, or a wall, or, in the case of the
+terra-cotta bricks, a portion of a French gentleman's country villa--the
+kind you see dozens of along the railway between Paris and Versailles.
+And however strong the child's desire that what he shall build shall be
+a palace or a church, that is, something beautiful and romantic, what he
+does build will always be the last thing he does, or ought to, admire.
+The fault is in the materials. They are lacking both in quality and
+quantity. No box of bricks that can at present be bought for money will
+build anything that can satisfy an imaginative child. An ordinary box of
+bricks--a really handsome one--measures, say, 12 by 8 by 2 in. If
+anything admirable is to be built from this amount of material the
+material ought to be presented in very small cubes, oblongs and
+arches--say 1 in. by ˝ in. for the largest bricks, and going down to Ľ
+by Ľ by Ľ in. Given these proportions a really pretty though
+undistinguished building might result. But in the box of bricks 12 by 8
+by 2 in. the smallest cube measures ľ in. and the largest brick 9 by ľ
+by ľ in. These long slabs of surface cannot be broken and disguised in
+such small buildings as the only ones which the materials are enough to
+build. Hence, the deadly monotony of façade, broken only by the three
+or, in the case of the really handsome box, five arches, and suggesting
+nothing so much as a "works" or a workhouse.
+
+[Illustration: THE SQUARE TOWER.]
+
+In the bricks themselves there is not enough variety. The stone bricks,
+it is true, have broken out into a variety of ugly shapes and a blue
+colour with which you can, if you like, build a Mansard roof. But a
+Mansard roof in a coarse ugly blue tint, is no thing of beauty.
+Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support it, and if you make
+your building solid, every brick in your box will be used up, and all
+you will have to show for it will be a partially built wing of a
+peculiarly undesirable villa residence, replete with every modern
+inconvenience. Nor must it be supposed that the difficulty can be met
+by adding more and more boxes of bricks. Add them, by all means; and the
+result will be a larger and probably an uglier factory, or a completed,
+and therefore more completely hideous, villa. Unless you are a
+millionaire, and have a toy cupboard as big as a pantechnicon, you will
+never have enough bricks to build up the solid masses which rest the
+eye, and give solidity and dignity to architecture. Among such solid
+masses _steps_ are not the least important. Every child knows that a
+really good flight of steps will take half the bricks in his box and
+leave insufficient material for the edifice to which the steps were
+intended to lead up. The tall broad smooth wall, its quiet surface
+disturbed only by one or two windows, a flight of steps and a doorway,
+is for ever out of reach of the child who has only bricks wherewith to
+build.
+
+[Illustration: SHELL ARCHES]
+
+The arches supplied with boxes of bricks are usually few and badly
+proportioned. There is seldom any provision for setting them up in a
+colonnade.
+
+The pillars which will support the ends of two arches are too wide for
+the _end_ arch, which is single. This difficulty is dealt with in stone
+bricks, but not in wooden ones; at any rate so far as my experience
+goes.
+
+There never was a time, one supposes, when so much money was spent on
+children and their toys. It is impossible to believe that, should some
+toy maker design and put on the market really desirable bricks for
+children, there would not be a ready sale for them. I suggest, then,
+that bricks are too large, and too small--and that what is needed is
+much smaller bricks, and much larger ones. The bricks in the old chest
+in our nursery started with 2-in. cubes, and went on in gradations of
+2-in. to the largest brick--12 by 2 by 2 in. The chest itself must have
+been at least 4 by 2 by 1˝ ft. Another detestable quality in our modern
+bricks is their inexactness--a sixteenth or even a quarter of an inch,
+more or less, is no more to the maker of bricks nowadays than it is to
+a bad dressmaker. Our bricks were well and truly cut: they were of
+seasoned oak, smooth and pleasant to touch--none of the rough-sawn edges
+which vex the hand and render the building unstable; they were heavy--a
+very important quality in bricks. They "stayed put." I suggest that such
+bricks as these, supplemented by arches of varied curves, but unvarying
+thicknesses, and slabs of board varying in breadth but not in length,
+would not be a toy beyond the purse of kind uncles and aunts, and
+certainly not beyond the means of our Council schools. The slabs of
+boards are to build steps with and to make roofs with. Every child who
+has ever built with bricks feels the reckless wastefulness of using for
+steps the bricks so much needed for walls and towers. And who has not
+experienced the aggravation of finding when his tower is built that he
+has used up all the long bricks near its foundation and has now none
+left which are long enough to lay across its summit and form its roof?
+The slabs of board should be, like the bricks, of seasoned oak, and
+should be an inch thick. There should be plenty of arches--so as to
+render possible some sort of resemblance to Norman and classical
+architecture.
+
+But bricks alone, however beautiful and varied, cannot as building
+material have the value which material freely chosen would have.
+Children love to make mud pies, and to build sand castles, because the
+material is plastic and responds with more or less of docility to their
+demands upon it. Also there is always enough of it, which there never is
+of bricks, or for the matter of that, of plasticine. I can imagine a
+splendid happiness for a child in a bushel of plasticine--but the sticks
+of plasticine are too small to be made into anything architecturally
+satisfying; and much too expensive for ordinary children to have in any
+but such quantities as encourage niggling. You will notice that children
+never tire of building sand castles on the sea-shore--but they would
+soon tire of building with a quart of damp sand on a table. It is true
+that the sea washes away your sand castle, usually before it is
+finished, but its end is finely catastrophic and full of damp delightful
+incident. Also the climax has the great essential of drama--it is
+inevitable. How different the demolition of the brick-built house by
+mamma, who wants space for cutting out, or by Mary, who desires to lay
+the table. The most promising of palaces, the most beautiful of bridges,
+are, at the urgence of these grown-up needs, swept away, and so, never
+being able to finish anything, the builder becomes discouraged. Perhaps
+he takes to the floor as an eligible building site, only to find his
+buildings exposed to the tempestuous petticoat of Mary, or the
+carelessly stepping high-heeled shoes of mamma. The same thing happens
+with a dolls' school, or a dolls' dinner-party, or any game requiring
+pageantry of any sort--so that little girls who would like their dolls
+to be actors in some scene of magnificence find no safe place for the
+actors save in their arms--and nurse with enforced premature maternal
+fussings the doll who, in happier circumstances, might be a Druid or a
+martyr, or Francis the First at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is
+better to the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby
+for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on.
+
+In any house where space makes such a thing possible, a table might be
+set aside for children, to be their very own--a table on which neither
+food nor millinery should ever trespass. Of course it is needful that
+toys and pseudo-toys should be "put away" daily, but it is not necessary
+that they should all be put away. Those which are being used in some
+splendid half-developed scheme might surely be allowed to stay where
+they are, so that it may be possible to go on with the game next day. A
+truce might be called of that ruthless tidying up which, every day,
+destroys the new idea, and compels the child each day to produce a new
+scheme instead of allowing it to work on yesterday's and bring it to
+something a little nearer the perfection which it touched when the
+child's mind first conceived it. But, it may be urged, children leave
+everything half-finished, and go off to something else. Of course they
+do--but clear away the half-finished thing, and you will find when they
+come back from the butterfly flight after some other interest, that they
+will not be pleased with you.
+
+"I've put all your bricks nicely away," you say proudly; and Tommy will
+say "Bother!" in his heart, even if his lips are sufficiently trained to
+avoid that expletive and to substitute: "I do wish you hadn't: I wanted
+to finish building my tower."
+
+You see one thing leads to another. It isn't that children are any more
+bird-witted than we are: it is that they have not yet learned to
+restrain the thousand curiosities, desires, and creative impulses proper
+to their age. You, of course, if you desired to set up a tableau of the
+Field of the Cloth of Gold, would sit down with a bit of pencil and the
+back of an envelope and jot down all the properties required for staging
+the scene. But the child who has "had" the Field "in History," and whose
+imagination has been stirred by the name of it--a thing that will happen
+under the stupidest of teachers--sets up Henry and Francis in paper
+crowns and only then begins to see that tents and banners and cloth of
+gold are lacking. Perhaps he goes off to the village shop to get flags,
+perhaps to your handkerchief case for tent-cloth, perhaps to the meadow
+beyond the orchard to gather buttercups. While on any of these quests
+some supremely important event may strike across his plans, and
+overshadow them--a new kitten, a gift from the gardener of plants for
+his little garden, or the fact that some one is going fishing. Then
+Francis and Henry are forgotten, the buttercups left dying on the
+doorstep, and the tent-cloth crammed into the pockets among string,
+stamps, acid drops, and pieces of the watch he took to pieces last
+holidays and never put together again, and he will follow the new trail.
+But he will come back to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and if you have
+"tidied up" the kings and put their crowns in the wastepaper basket the
+child will be disappointed and worried, his imagination checked and his
+scheme baffled.
+
+[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF TENTS.]
+
+His annexation of your handkerchiefs will not occur if you have
+accustomed him to come to you or to his nurse for the means to his small
+ends; but if there is no one to whom he can apply for help, you will
+find that he will not stick at the sacred threshold of your handkerchief
+case. The tents of the Field of the Cloth of Gold will be far more
+important to him than the inviolability of that scented
+treasure-house--unless, of course, you happen to have explained to him
+exactly how much you dislike that your handkerchiefs should keep the
+sort of company they meet with in his pockets. Then, if he loves you,
+and has found you reasonable, he will refrain, while wondering at your
+prejudices. But he will--or ought to--find some other material for
+tents--letter paper perhaps. Letter paper makes quite good tents, though
+not nearly so good, of course, as handkerchiefs folded
+diagonally--supported by a central pole, say a penholder, and fastened
+down at the tucked-in corners with pins or rose thorns. You can explain
+to him that rose-thorns hurt handkerchiefs, but you will not punish him
+if this has not occurred to him. And this brings one to the question of
+crime and punishment, of which perhaps I had better say what I have to
+say before I go on talking about bricks and how to supplement them. As
+I was saying, one thing leads to another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The Moral Code
+
+
+IN attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most
+essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one
+proposes to enforce and to explain. There is nothing from which
+children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the
+incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them. Before you
+can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your
+heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it, before
+you can gain a willing obedience to it from those on whom you wish to
+impose it. By this I do not mean only that we ought to make up our minds
+whether this, that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong, as it
+occurs, but that we ought to have a clear perception and knowledge of
+the things that are right and the things that are wrong, and have a
+standard which we can apply to any new action brought under our notice,
+so that, measuring the new act by our old standard, we shall be able to
+say, with some sort of rough accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is
+right."
+
+And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor
+is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the
+standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency.
+The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when
+desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and
+the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal
+merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is
+right," "This is wrong," beating down the children's questionings by
+your mere _Ipse dixit_; but a time will come when it will not be enough,
+in answer to their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?" to answer
+"Because I say so." The child will want some other standard which he
+himself can apply. The standard of what you say may be a shifting one,
+and anyhow, he cannot be at all sure what you will say unless he knows
+what is your standard, the standard by which you will decide whether to
+say, in any given case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in order
+that you may clearly set before the child your own moral standard you
+must first have set it very clearly before yourself. It is not enough
+to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If
+you feel that these things are wrong because they are contrary to the
+will of God, you will not find that that explanation is sufficient for a
+child unless he knows very much more about God than His name and certain
+miraculous and incomprehensible attributes of His. He will want to know
+what is the will of God, to which these wrong things are contrary. And
+he will want very much to know the definite right as well as the
+definite wrong. You will have to give the child a standard that can be
+applied to positives as well as negatives.
+
+There is a very simple standard by which to measure the actions of
+children--and, much more severely, our own actions. It is set up in the
+words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would they should do unto
+you"--a standard so simple that quite little children can understand and
+apply it, a standard so severe that were it understood and applied by us
+who are no longer children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we call
+civilisation could not endure for a day. There is no other standard by
+which a child can judge its own actions, and yours, and judge them
+justly.
+
+Having fixed your standard it will be necessary to try your own actions
+by it as well as the child's. And this standard will give you the only
+vital code of morality, because it compels the continual exercise of
+imagination, the continual preening and flight of the wings of the soul.
+You cannot order your life by that Divine precept without a hundred
+times a day asking yourself, "How should _I_ like that, if I were not
+myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in some
+one else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?"
+you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own
+possessions stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may
+teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It
+is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," or
+even "because God says so"; but if you want to mark it right or wrong,
+to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the
+soul, teach the child to see for himself _how_ things are right and
+wrong--and to judge of them by that one Divine and unfailing rule.
+
+Of course even when the child knows what is right he will not always do
+it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered is
+how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rectitude of which he,
+no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage
+punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay
+out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More
+humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment
+is curative--that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing
+wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his
+opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will
+not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the
+criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the _certainty_ of
+punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot
+pretend to your child that if he does wrong you are certain to know and
+to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he will find you
+out immediately, and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can,
+however, without any pretence, assure him that if he does wrong he
+himself will know it, that it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and
+miserable till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance
+and forgiveness. That if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty
+and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel clean and
+brave. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you
+shall have succeeded in convincing him that your standard is a true
+standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are
+wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the
+child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the
+knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.
+
+No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own
+moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way he
+will not be always bothering about which way he may be living--it will
+be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just
+as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly, only
+when one chokes one knows that one isn't.
+
+[Illustration: ONE HALF OF THE CITY.
+
+72]]
+
+Punishment, however, should not be confused with the consequences of
+action, and while children are yet too small to understand all that God
+may be to them, it is possible to show them the _consequences_ of their
+misdeeds, magnifying these beyond the consequences of the act to be
+reprobated and thus pointing the general moral. I mean that one may
+honourably apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood, the _sort_
+of consequences--proportioned, of course, to the wrong-doing--which
+would result from such wrong-doing on a larger scale by a grown-up
+person. It will be exceedingly troublesome and painful for you, but
+perhaps its painfulness to you may be the measure of its value to the
+child. For instance, Tommy steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies
+is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is very little, and your
+impulse, if not to slap him, might be to tell him that he is a very
+naughty boy and have done with it. It will go to your heart to bring
+home to him the consequences of theft, especially as you cannot do it at
+once; but if, next time you are about to send him to the shop for
+something, you say, "No: I can't send you because you might steal my
+pennies as you did the other day"--this will be hateful for you to
+do--but it will show him more plainly than anything else what happens to
+people who steal. They are not trusted. And the same with lies. Show him
+that those who tell lies are not believed.
+
+But, remembering how it felt to be a child, have pity, and do not teach
+him these lessons when any one else is there. Let the humiliation of
+them be a secret between you two alone. Only when a wrong has been done
+which demands a restitution or an amend should the soul of the child,
+shamed with wrong-doing, be exposed to alien eyes.
+
+When we sit in judgment on the aggressions and on the shortcomings of
+others the first need is neither justice nor mercy, but imagination with
+self-knowledge. The judge should be able to put himself in the place of
+the accused, to perceive, by sympathetic vision, the point of view of
+the one who stands before the judgment-seat. The judge is an adult human
+being, and therefore has some knowledge of the mental and moral
+processes of human beings. He should use this knowledge; and when it
+comes to a grown-up judging a child, it is no less necessary for the
+judge to place himself imaginatively in the place of the small offender.
+And this cannot be done by imagination and self-consideration alone.
+Memory is needed. Let me say it again: there is only one way of
+understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by
+observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory.
+Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a
+child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings
+of children. When you were a child you suffered intensely from
+injustice, from want of understanding, in your grown-up censors. You
+were punished when you had not meant to do wrong: you escaped punishment
+when you had not meant to do right. The whole scheme of grown-up law
+seemed to you, and very likely was, arbitrary and incomprehensible. And
+you suffered from it desperately. So much that, even if you have now
+forgotten all that you suffered, the mark of that suffering none the
+less remains on your soul to this day.
+
+It would seem that the humiliations, the mortifications endured in
+childhood leave an ineffaceable brand on the spirit. How then can we not
+remember, and, remembering, refrain from hurting other children as we
+were hurt?
+
+The spirit of the child is sensitive to the slightest change in the
+atmosphere about him. You can convey disapproval quite easily--and
+approval also. But while most parents and guardians are constantly alive
+to the necessity for expressing disapproval and inflicting punishment,
+the other side of the medal seems to be hidden from them.
+
+The most prevalent idea of training children is the idea of prohibition
+and punishment. "You are not to do it! You will? Then take that!" the
+blow or punishment following, expresses simply and exactly the whole
+theory of moral education held by the mass of modern mothers. The vast
+mistake, both in the education of children and government of nations, is
+the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues. Also the fact that
+punishment follows on the failure _not_ to do certain things--whereas no
+commensurate reward is offered even for success in _not_ doing, let
+alone for success in active and honourable well-doing. The reward of
+negative virtue is negative also, and consists simply in non-punishment.
+The rewards of active virtue are, in the world of men, money and praise.
+But there are deeds for which money cannot pay, and sometimes these are
+rewarded by medals and paragraphs in the newspapers--not at all the same
+thing as being rewarded by the praise of your fellow-men. Now children,
+like all sane human beings, love praise. They love it more keenly
+perhaps than other human beings because their natural craving for it has
+not been overlaid with false modesties and shames. They have not learned
+that
+
+    Praise to the face
+    Is open disgrace.
+
+On the contrary, praise to the face seems to them natural, right, and
+altogether desirable. See that they get it.
+
+Do you remember when you were little how you struggled to exercise some
+tiresome negative virtue, such as not biting your nails, not teasing the
+cat, not executing, with your school-boots, that heavy shuffling
+movement, so simply relieving to you, so mysteriously annoying to the
+grown-ups? Can you have forgotten how for ages and ages--three or four
+days, even--you refrained from drinking water with your mouth full of
+food, from leaving your handkerchief about in obvious spots natural and
+convenient, how you sternly denied yourself the pleasure of drawing your
+hoop stick along the front railings--because, though you enjoyed this
+musical exercise, others did not? And how, all through the interminable
+period of self-denial, you heartened yourself to these dismal
+refrainings by the warm comfortable thought, "_Won't_ they be
+pleased?"--and how they never were. They took it all as a matter of
+course. To them, because they had forgotten how it felt to be a child,
+all your heroic sacrifices and renunciations counted as nothing. To them
+it was natural that a child should keep his fingers out of his mouth,
+and off the tail of Puss, should keep his feet still and his
+handkerchief in his pocket, should do the suitable things with meat,
+drink, and hoop-sticks. They never noticed, and so they never praised.
+But when, worn out by long abstinence from natural joys, natural
+relaxations, you broke one of those rules which seemed to you so useless
+and so arbitrary, then they noticed fast enough.
+
+[Illustration: THE TAIL OF PUSS.]
+
+"Can you _never_ remember," they said, "just a simple thing like not
+biting your nails?" Bitter aloes following, no doubt. Or, "I really
+should have thought," they would say, "that considering the number of
+times I've spoken about it you would remember not to make that frightful
+noise," with boots or hoop sticks or a blade of wet grass or what not.
+They did not pause to think, in their earnest grown-up business of
+"bringing the boy up," how many, how very many, and how seemingly silly,
+were the "don'ts" which you had to remember. But you will not be like
+that: you will notice and approve, and most needful of all, reward with
+praise the earnest, difficult refrainings of the child who is trying to
+please you: who is trying to learn the long table of your commandments
+all beginning with "Thou shalt not," and to practise them, not because
+these commandments appeal to him as reasonable or just or useful, but
+just because he loves you, wants to please you, and, deepest need of
+love, wants you to be pleased with him.
+
+A hasty yet determined effort at putting yourself in his place is the
+thing needed every time you have to sit in judgment on the actions of
+another human being--most of all when that human being is a little
+child. If we cultivated this habit we should not hurt other people as we
+do. I have seen cruel things.
+
+A little girl, suffering from a slight affection of the eye, was given
+by a sympathetic aunt the run of a box of that aunt's old ball-dresses.
+She spent a whole hour in arranging a costume which seemed to her to be
+of royal beauty. A crushed pink tulle dress, a many-coloured striped
+Roman sash, white satin slippers, put on over the black strapped shoes,
+and turning up very much at the toes. White gloves, very dirty and
+wrinkled like a tortoise's legs over the plump dimpled arms. Hair
+dressed high on the head over a pad of folded stockings, secured by
+hairpins borrowed from the housemaid. A wreath, of crushed red calico
+roses from somebody's last summer's hat, some pearl beads, the property
+of cook, and a blue heart out of a cracker--saved since Christmas.
+
+"I am a beautiful Princess," said the child, and the housemaid responded
+heartily: "That you are, ducky, and no mistake. Go and show mother."
+
+But mother, when she was told that this stumbling, long-tailed bundle of
+crushed finery was a beautiful Princess, laughed and said, "Princess
+Rag-Bag, I should say."
+
+"It's only pretending, you know," the child explained, wondering why
+explanations should be needed by mother and not by Eliza.
+
+The mother laughed again. "I shouldn't pretend to be a Princess with
+that great stye in my eye," she said, and thought no more about it.
+
+But the child remembers to this day how she slunk away and tore off the
+beautiful Princess-clothes, and cried and cried and cried, and wished
+that she was dead. Children really do wish that, sometimes.
+
+Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness. A child spends hours in
+preparing some surprise for you--decorates your room with flowers, not
+in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe before your impatiently
+awaited arrival--or ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters to
+represent flags at your home-coming.
+
+"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly, hardly looking--and the child
+sees that you hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's a dear!"
+
+The child clears it all away, and with the dying flowers something else
+is cleared away, something that will no more live again than will the
+faded flowers.
+
+Be generous of praise--it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of
+kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the
+child the true Elixir of Life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Praise and Punishment
+
+
+[Illustration: THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY.
+
+82]]
+
+WHILE admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous
+to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to
+the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up may often be better for
+him--or much more often her--than it is for the child for whom that
+sacrifice is made. There is a certain danger that the enthusiastic
+educator, passionately desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may
+incidentally, and quite without meaning it, sacrifice something very
+vital in the child. For the child whose every want is anticipated, whose
+every thought is considered, who is surrounded by the softness of love
+and the sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint and dismay
+the fond parent or guardian, pastor or master, by growing up selfish,
+cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with no capacity for obedience, no
+power of endurance, no hardihood, no resource--whining in adversity
+and intolerable in success. The object of education is to fit the child
+for the life of the man. Once it was held that a rigorous discipline,
+enforced by violence, was the best preparation for the life which is
+never too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all that, and there is
+some danger that the pendulum may swing too far, and that the aim of
+education may come to mean only the ensuring of a happy childhood,
+without arming the child for the battle of life. It is right that to the
+educator the child should be the prime object, the centre of the
+universe, the prime consideration to which every other consideration
+must give way. But there is the danger that the child may become his own
+prime object, not only the centre of his own universe, but its
+circumference, and cherish, deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the
+conviction that all other considerations should and will give way to his
+desires.
+
+Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough, hard school, that he is
+only the centre of his own universe in that sense in which the same is
+true of us all--that far from being the prime object of the world which
+surrounds him, he himself counts for little or nothing, except to those
+who love him--and that the consideration he receives will not be, as was
+the consideration lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging,
+and invariable, but will be conditioned by the services he renders to
+others and the extent to which he can be to them pleasant or useful.
+Life, it is true, will teach him all this, but if her teaching be a
+course of lessons in a wholly new subject, they will be very difficult
+to learn, and the learning will hurt. Whereas if, from the very
+beginning, the child is taught to understand the interdependence of
+human beings, the fact that rights involve duties and that duties confer
+rights, he will be able to apply and to use for his own help the lessons
+which later life will teach him. More, he will have at the outset of
+life the advantage which one with a clear conception of rights and
+duties has over one who only sees life as a muddle and maze of things
+that are "jolly hard lines." They suffer as without hope who see that
+the world needs mending, and have never made up their minds what sort of
+world they would like. Whereas the child to whom, quite early, the
+lesson of human solidarity has been taught will, when he shall be a man,
+know very well what he wants, and will be able, however humbly, to help,
+in his day and generation, to re-mould the world to the fashion of his
+desire.
+
+It is not difficult to teach children the duties of kindness and
+helpfulness to others, and the duty of public spirit and loyalty to
+their fellow-men. A healthy child is active, energetic, and deeply
+desirous of using his senses and his faculties. It is possible to assign
+to quite a small child certain duties, but the wise educator will manage
+to make such duties privileges and not tasks. The system of sentencing
+children to the performance of useful offices by way of punishment is
+abominable. It gives them for ever a distaste for that particular form
+of social service.
+
+If we must punish, let us not permit the punishments to trench on the
+province of useful and, in good conditions, pleasant tasks. Give the boy
+an imposition rather than an order to weed the shrubbery walk; set the
+girl to learn a French verb rather than to hem dusters. The
+consciousness of being useful is very dear to children--it is worth
+while to feel and to show gratitude to them for all services rendered,
+and though it may be, as they say, more trouble than it is worth to
+teach the children to help effectually, that only means that it is more
+trouble than the help they give is worth. What is really valuable is
+the cultivation of the sense that it is a good and pleasant thing to
+help mother to wash up, to help father to water the geraniums, and,
+further, a thing which will make father and mother pleased and grateful.
+Children, like the rest of us, love to feel themselves important. Is it
+not well that they should feel themselves important as givers, and not
+as claimants only?
+
+The tale of their public obligations may well begin with the lesson that
+it is part of the duty of a citizen to help to keep his city, his
+country, clean and beautiful. Therefore, we must not leave nasty traces
+of our presence in street or meadow--such traces as orange-peel,
+banana-skins, and the greasy bag that once held the bun or the
+bull's-eye. And it is quite as important to learn what we should as what
+we should not do. The idea and organisation of the Boy Scouts is a fine
+object-lesson in the way of training children to be good citizens. The
+duties of a citizen should be taught in all schools: they are more
+important than the latitude of Cathay and the industries of Kamskatka.
+Even the smallest children could learn something of this branch of
+education. I should like to write a little book of Moral Songs for Young
+Citizens, only I wouldn't call it that. The songs in it might take the
+place of "Mary had a little lamb" or whatever it is that they make the
+infants learn by heart. One of them might go something like this:
+
+    I must not steal, and I must learn
+    Nothing is mine that I do not earn.
+    I must try in work and play
+    To make things beautiful every day.
+    I must be kind to every one
+    And never let cruel things be done.
+    I must be brave, and I must try
+    When I am hurt never to cry,
+    And always laugh as much as I can
+    And be glad that I'm going to be a man,
+    To work for my living and help the rest,
+    And never do less than my very best.
+
+Another might begin:
+
+    I must not litter the park or the street
+    With bits of paper or things to eat:
+    I must not pick the public flowers
+    They are not _mine_, but they are _ours_. . . .
+
+And so on. Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you
+all your life. The duties and refrainings just touched on here might be
+elaborated in different poems. There might be one on being brave, and
+another on prompt obedience to the word of command. There is no position
+in life where the habit of obedience to your superior officer is not of
+value. To teach obedience without bullying would be quite easy: with
+very little children it could take the form of a game, in which a
+series of orders were given--for the performance of such actions as
+occur in the mulberry bush; and the competition among the children to be
+the first to obey the new order would quicken the child's mind and body,
+while the habit of obedience to the word of command would be firmly
+planted, so that it would grow with the child's growth and adapt itself
+to the needs of life. I would write more than one poem, I think, about
+the green country and the shame it is that those who should love and
+protect it desecrate it as they do. Let it be the pride of the child
+that he is not of the sort of people who leave greasy papers lying about
+in woods, broken bottles in meadows, and old sardine tins among the
+rushes at the margin of cool streams. Such people touch no foot of land
+that they do not desecrate and defile. Wherever they are suffered to be,
+there they leave behind them the vilest leavings. Filthy papers, the
+rinds and skins of fruit, crusts and parings, jagged tins, smashed
+bottles, straw and shavings and empty stained cardboard boxes. They
+leave it all, openly and shamelessly, making the magic meadows sordid as
+a suburb, and carrying into the very heart of the country the
+vulgarities of the street corner. It is time, indeed, that certain of
+the finer duties of citizenship were taught in all schools, Harrow as
+well as Houndsditch, Eton as well as Borstal. And one of the first of
+these is the keeping of the beauty of beautiful places unsmirched, the
+duty of preserving for others the beauty which we ourselves admire, the
+duty of burning bits of paper and burying pieces of orange-peel. If
+there is not time to teach geography as well as the duties and decencies
+of a citizen, the geography should go, and the duties and decencies be
+taught. For what is the use of knowing the names of places if you do not
+know that places should be beautiful, and what is the use of knowing how
+many counties there are in England unless you know also that every field
+and every tree and every stream in every one of those counties is a
+precious gift of God not to be desecrated by shameless refuse and
+garbage, but to be cared for as one cares for one's garden, and loved,
+as one should love every inch of our England, this garden-land more
+beautiful than any garden in the world?
+
+A child should be taught to read almost as soon as it has learned to
+speak. I can remember my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a time
+when I could not read. Without going into details as to the merits of
+different methods of teaching, I may say that a good many words may be
+taught before it is necessary to teach the letters--that reading should
+precede spelling--that CAT should be presented whole, as the symbol of
+Cat--and that the dissection of it into C.A.T. should come later. I
+believe that children taught in this way, and taught young, will not in
+after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling. They will spell
+naturally, as they speak or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of
+reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians, it would be impossible
+to speak too highly. It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet.
+The value to the child himself is not less. Nor is it only that the
+matter of his reading stores his mind with new material. To him also it
+is a good thing that he should sometimes be still and quiet, and at the
+same time interested and occupied. Of books for little children there
+are plenty--not fine literature, it is true--but harmless. As the child
+grows older he will want more books, and different books--and if you
+insist on personally conducting him on his grand tour through literature
+he will probably miss a good many places that he would like to go to.
+For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a
+good general library. When he has exhausted the story books he will
+read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at
+science, poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of thirteen,
+browsed contentedly in such a library--where Percy's anecdotes in
+thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and
+Berkeley. I even read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and was none the
+worse for it. It is astonishing how little harm comes to children
+through books. Unless they have been taught by servants' chatter how to
+look for the "harm," they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely
+every book is fit for a child's reading, but if you allow the reading of
+the Old Testament it is mere imbecility to insist that all the rest of
+your child's reading shall ignore the facts of life. You can always have
+a locked book-case if you choose: only see to it that the doors are not
+of glass, for the forbidden is always the desired.
+
+As regards the facts of life, by which I mean the physiological facts
+about which there is so much needless and vain concealment, there is, it
+seems to me, only one rule. If your child has learned to love and trust
+you it will come to you with its questions, instead of going to the
+housemaid or the groom. Answer all its questions truthfully, even at the
+cost of a little trouble in formulating your answers. Do not leave the
+child to learn the truth about its body and its birth from vulgar and
+tainted sources. There is absolutely nothing that you cannot decently
+tell a child when it has reached the age when it understands that
+certain things are not fit subjects for public conversation--and until
+it has reached that age it will not ask that sort of questions. There is
+no difficulty in making children understand that their digestive
+processes are not to be discussed in general society, and it is quite
+easy to explain to them that other physiological processes are also to
+be avoided as subjects for general conversation. The Cat and her family
+will help you to explain all that the child wants to know. The child
+should be taught that its body is the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and that
+it is our duty to keep our bodies healthy, clean, and well-exercised,
+just as we should try to keep our minds strong and active, and our
+hearts tender and pure. And one need not always "talk down" to children:
+they understand far better than you think. They are always flattered by
+talk that rises now and then above the level of their understanding. And
+if they do not understand they will tell you so, and you can simplify.
+In talking of the subjects which interest them, you need not be afraid
+of being too clever. For even if they do not ask, your instinct and the
+child's eyes will, if there be love and trust between you, tell you when
+you are getting out of its depth. But there must be love and trust:
+without that all education outside book-learning is for ever
+impossible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The One Thing Needful
+
+
+THE most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest
+worshipper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the
+steadily increasing and brutal ugliness of life. Civilisation, whatever
+else it is, is a state in which a few people have the chance of living
+beautifully--those who take that chance are fewer still--and the
+enormous majority live, by no choice or will of their own, lives which
+at the best are uncomfortable, anxious, and lacking in beauty, and at
+the worst are so ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that those who
+feel their condition most can hardly bear to think of them, and those
+who have not imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear it
+unless they succeed in persuading themselves that the poor of this world
+are the heirs of the next, while hoping, at the same time, that a
+portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may, after all, be reserved for
+Dives.
+
+The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and
+mines and pot banks--coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright
+rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green
+country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the
+smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron
+advertisements that scar the fields of earth--all the torn paper and
+straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root
+spring pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the mean subservience of
+the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the
+green country is disfigured by all this machinery which ministers to the
+hope of getting rich, so is the face of man marred by the fear of
+getting poor. Look at the faces you see in the street--old and young,
+gay and sad--on all there is the brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety
+that never rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for the future:
+the fear of poverty for the rich, the fear of starvation for the poor.
+Think of the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering in the East
+of London--not in comfortable Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way;
+think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet and Bow--then think of Park
+Lane and Bond Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the West is no
+less terrible than the East. If you want to be sure of this, bring a
+hungry, ragged child from that Eastern land and set it outside a West
+End restaurant; let it press its dirty little face against the plate
+glass and gaze at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling round the
+bright tables inside. The diners may be smart, the ragged child may be
+picturesque--but bring the two together, and consider the conjunction.
+
+[Illustration: THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.]
+
+And all this ugliness springs from the same cause. As Ruskin says: "We
+have forgotten God." We have therefore forgotten His attributes, mercy,
+loving-kindness, justice, truth, and beauty. Their names are still on
+our lips, but the great, stupid, crashing, blundering machine which we
+call civilisation knows them not. The Devil's gospel of _laissez-faire_
+still inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for himself, and Mammon
+for the foremost. We no longer care that life should be beautiful for
+all God's children--we wish it to be beautiful for us and forget who, as
+we wish that wish, becomes our foster-father. There can be no healing
+of the great wound in the body of mankind till each one of us would die
+rather than see the ugliness of a wound on the body of the least of
+these our brethren. But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty,
+our sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds do not hurt us. We
+have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as
+we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed
+where Manchester sprawls in the smoke--the fair hills and streams on
+which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.
+
+[Illustration: OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES.]
+
+Now I do believe that this insensitiveness to ugliness and misery, this
+blindness to wanton befouling of human life and the green world, comes
+less from the corruption of man's heart than from the emptiness of the
+teaching which man receives when he is good and little and a child. The
+teaching in our schools is almost wholly materialistic. The child is
+taught the botanical name of the orange--dissects it and its flower and
+perhaps learns the Latin names of the flower and fruit; but it is not
+taught that oranges are things you will be pleased with yourself for
+giving up to some one who is thirstier than you are--or that to throw
+orange-peel on the pavement where some one may slip on it, fall and
+hurt himself, is as mean a trick as stealing a penny from a blind man.
+We teach the children about the wonders of gases and ethers, but we do
+not explain to them that furnaces ought to consume their own smoke, or
+why. The children learn of acids and starches, but not that it is a
+disgraceful thing to adulterate beer and bread. The rules of
+multiplication and subtraction are taught in schools, but not the old
+rule, "If any will not work, neither shall he eat."
+
+There is no dogmatical teaching. That means a diet of dry bones. It
+means that the child is never shown how to look for happiness in the
+performance of acts which do not, on the face of them, look as though
+they would make him happy. It is not explained to him that man's life
+and the will of God are like a poem--God writes a line and man must make
+the next line rhyme to it. When it does rhyme, then you get that
+happiness which can only come from harmony. And when you do your best to
+make your line rhyme and cannot--well, the Author of the first line
+knows that it was your best that you did. God is shown, when He is shown
+at all, to our modern children, as a sort of glorified head master, who
+will be tremendously down on you if you break the rules: alternatively
+as a sort of rich uncle who will give you things if you ask properly. He
+is not shown as the Father to whom you can tell everything.
+
+If you are successful in your work you win a prize and go home to your
+people, and tell them that you are first in history, receiving their
+applause without shame.
+
+If you are good at games or athletics you can tell your mates that you
+made two goals or eighty-three runs or whatever it is, and delight in
+their admiration. If you are an athlete the applause of the bystanders
+is your right and your reward.
+
+But whom can you tell of the little intimate triumphs, the secret
+successes, the temptations resisted, the kind things done, the gentle
+refrainings, the noble darings of that struggling, bewildered,
+storm-tossed little thing you call your soul?
+
+God, your Father, is the only person to whom you can talk of these. To
+him you can say: "Father, I wanted to pay Smith Minor out to-day for
+something he did last week, and I didn't because I thought You wouldn't
+like it. Are You pleased with Your boy?" Do they teach you this in
+schools or give you any hint or hope of what you will feel when your
+Father answers: "Yes, My son, I am pleased." Or do they teach you to
+say: "Father, I am sorry I was a beast to-day, and I'll try not to do it
+again"--and tell you that a Voice will answer, "I am sorry too, My
+son--but I am glad you told Me. Try again, dear lad. And let Me help
+you"?
+
+As you show your Latin exes. to your master, so you should be taught to
+show the leaves of your life to the only One who can read and understand
+that blotted record. And if you learn to show that book every day there
+will be less and less in it that you mind showing, and more and more
+that will give you the glow and glory of the heart that comes to him who
+hears "Faithful and good, well done."
+
+You cannot suppose that your life is rhyming with the will of God when
+you destroy the beauty of the country and of the lives of men so that
+you may get rich and you and your children may live without working.
+
+Can you imagine a company promoter who should say: "Father, I have made
+a lot of money out of a company which has gone to pieces, and a lot of
+other people are ruined, but I know that there must always be rich and
+poor, and if I didn't do it some one else would"?
+
+Or--"Father, I spoiled the green fields where children used to play and
+I have built a lot of streets of hideous and uncomfortable houses, but
+they are quite good enough for the working people. As long as they have
+such low wages they can't live like human beings. And Thou knowest, O
+Father, that wages are and must be regulated by the divine law of supply
+and demand."
+
+Or--"Father, I have put sand in the sugar and poison in the beer, alum
+in the bread and water in the milk, all these being, as Thou knowest,
+Father, long-established trade customs."
+
+Men can say these things to themselves and to each other, but there is
+One to whom they cannot say them. It is of Him and not only of the
+wonders of His Universe that I would have the children taught. But they
+are only taught of the wonders, not of the Wonder-worker.
+
+It is not that there are none who could teach, no initiates of the great
+and simple mysteries, no keepers of the faith. There are such, but they
+are muzzled, and the detestable horrors of civilisation go on in a
+community which calls itself after the name of Christ. And so long as we
+have in our schools this materialistic teaching, so long shall we raise
+up generation after generation to support that civilisation and to keep
+it the damnable thing we know.
+
+Talk goes on and goes on and goes on. There is talk now of a Great
+Measure for the Reform of National Education, much talk--there will be
+more. There will be much ink spilt, much breath wasted; we shall hear of
+Montessori and Froebel and Pestalozzi, of Science and the Classics, of
+opportunities of ladders of scholarships and prizes and endowments.
+
+We shall hear how hard it is that the sons of the plumber should not be
+able to go to Oxford and how desirable it is that daughters of the
+dustman should sometimes take the Prix de Rome.
+
+We shall be told how important are the telescope and the microscope, and
+how right it is that children should know all about their little
+insides. The one thing we shall not hear about will be the one thing
+needful.
+
+A tottering Government may keep itself in power by such a measure, a
+defeated party may, by it, bring itself back to office, but such a
+measure will not keep the nation from perdition, nor bring back the soul
+of a man into the true way.
+
+We may build up as we will schemes of Education and Instruction, add
+science to science, learning to learning, and facts to facts; but what
+we shall build will be only a dead body unless it be informed by the
+breath of the Spirit which maketh alive. For Education which teaches a
+man everything but how to live to the glory of God and the service of
+man is not Education, but only instruction; and it is the fruit of the
+tree, not of Life, but of Death.
+
+
+
+
+_PART II_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Romance in Games
+
+
+A SHARP distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games
+without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply
+everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of
+the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural
+child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole
+enterprise worth while.
+
+In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister "I
+spy," a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows what wild
+ancestry lends to the game an excitement not to be found in games with
+bats and balls and nets and bails and straightforward trappings bought
+at shops. When you lurk in the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one
+who is hunting you, and to become in your turn the hunter, you are no
+longer a child, you are a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger
+or a black-fellow, according to the measure of your dreams and the
+nature of the latest book of your reading.
+
+At this point it occurs to me that perhaps you who read may have
+forgotten the difference between "Hide-and-seek" and "I spy."
+Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half the players hide, and the
+others seek them and there's an end of it. It is an interesting game,
+but flat compared with "I spy." It has, however, this merit, that it can
+be played without those screams to which grown-ups are, usually, so
+averse. Whereas I defy any one to play "I spy" without screaming.
+Hide-and-seek is a calm game; the thing sought for might almost as well
+be an inanimate object: it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants'
+eggs, of bears looking for honey. But "I spy" is the game of enemy
+looking for enemy: it calls for the virtues of fortitude, endurance,
+courage--for the splendours of physical fitness, for aptness, for speed.
+In "I spy" half the players hide and the others seek; but they seek not
+an unresisting stationary object, but a keen, watchful retaliatory
+terror. They seek, in shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house and
+conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge, and arbour, for the enemy,
+and when that enemy is found the seeker does not just say, "Oh, here
+you are"--that ending the game. Far otherwise; the seeker in "I spy"
+goes warily, his heart in his mouth--for, the moment he sees a hider, he
+must shout "I spy," adding the hider's name. "I spy Jimmy!" he cries,
+and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden one follows after--the
+hunted becoming in one swift terrible transition the hunter, and he who
+was the seeker flies with all the speed he may, across country, to the
+appointed "home." The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer and
+follows with yells. Grown-ups would always rather that you played
+hide-and-seek--and can you wonder? But sometimes they will concede to
+you "I spy" rights, and even join in the sport. It is always well, in
+playing any game where anything may be trampled, such as asparagus beds,
+or broken, such as windows, to have a grown-up or two on your side. And
+by "your," here, of course I mean children. The habit of years is not
+easily broken, and I am so much more used to writing _for_ children than
+_of_ them.
+
+Chevy Chase is a good old-fashioned game of courage and adventure. Does
+any one play it now? No child can play it _con amore_ who does not know
+who it was who
+
+    When his legs were smitten off
+    He fought upon his stumps,
+
+and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in the cup of defeat was "Earl
+Percy sees my face----"
+
+All wreathed with romance are the song-games, "Nuts in May," "There came
+Three Knights," and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing movement and
+the song of marriage-by-capture ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe
+to the vanquished! This is a very old game--and there are many words to
+it. One set I know, but I never have known the end. Little boys in light
+trousers and short jackets and little girls in narrow frilled gowns used
+to play it on the village green a hundred years ago. This is how it
+began:
+
+    Up and down the green grass
+      This and that and thus,
+    Come along, my pretty maid,
+      And take a walk with us;
+    You shall have a duck, my dear,
+      And you shall have a drake,
+    And you shall have a handsome man,
+      For your father's sake.
+
+My mother told me all of that song-game, and that is all of it that I
+can remember. She always said she would write it down, and I always
+thought there was plenty of time, and somehow there was not, and so I do
+not know the end. Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out the
+Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody Else now so mysteriously gets
+all the credit, may know the end of these verses. If he does, and if he
+sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.
+
+This game of come and go and give and take is alive in France; witness
+the old song:
+
+    Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
+    Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard
+        Toujours si gai?
+
+    Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine.
+    Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi
+        Toujours si gais.
+
+    Et que veulent ces cavaliers,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
+    Et que veulent ces cavaliers
+        Toujours si gais?
+
+    Des jeunes filles ŕ marier,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine;
+    Des jeunes filles ŕ marier,
+        Toujours si gais.
+
+And I have no doubt that stout Dutch children and German children with
+flaxen plaits, and small contadine, and Spanish and Swedish and Russian
+and Lithuanian babes all move rhythmically back and forth on their
+native greensward and rehearse the old story of the fair maid and the
+Knight "out to marry."
+
+The Mulberry Bush is another of the old song-games, where play-acting is
+the soul of the adventure, and this too is everywhere. "A la claire
+fontaine," I remember as the French version, danced on wet days in the
+cloisters of the convent of my youth. Le Pont d'Avignon, a glorious
+game, with its impersonations of animals, has, as far as I know, no
+counterpart in this country.
+
+All these games are active games: they can, of course, be played by
+sheer imitation, a sort of parrot-and-monkey aptitude will do it; but if
+they are to be enjoyed to the full, the imagination must have full play.
+To _be_ a knight a-riding to fetch a fair lady is quite simple, and
+quite thrilling--just as to be a bear demands nothing but growls and a
+plantigrade activity in the performer to be a fearful joy to the
+non-bear.
+
+Cricket and football, fives and racquets, the games that are played with
+things out of shops, do not need imagination to help them out. The games
+without bought accessories should perhaps rather be termed "plays" than
+games. And the more highly cultivated the imagination the more intensely
+joyous are the games. All sorts of acting, dressing-up, and pretending
+games depend entirely on the imagination, and it is well to encourage
+children to act scenes which they have observed, or heard about or read
+about. The smallest child will experience a real joy in putting its
+pinafore on wrong way round, call it a coat, and announce with pride
+that it is "Daddy going a tata."
+
+In the dolls' tea-parties you will observe a careful copy or travesty of
+your own "company manners," and as the small minds are filled with tales
+of wonder and adventure, you will find them re-enacted, the nursery
+rocking chair serving as charger for the gallant knight, and nurse's
+hassock taking quite adequately the part of the dragon. A small sister
+can generally be relied on to be the captive princess, especially if
+handsome trappings go with the part--and a cobweb brush is an admirable
+spear. The princess will be released from her bonds in time to act as
+chief mourner at the funeral of the slain hassock, which can be carried
+down the river in a barge made of the nursery table wrong way up--with
+the nursery tablecloth for a sail--an admirable tableau certain to occur
+if any one has told the children the story of Elaine. That the dragon
+should have as sumptuous a funeral as Enoch Arden himself, need not
+surprise you: a funeral is a funeral, be the corpse canary, guinea pig,
+or hassock, and to a dead dragon are due all the honours we pay to a
+gallant if unfortunate antagonist. Not only fairy tales, but history
+will be acted. You will have Jane as Queen Eleanor sucking the poison
+from Jack's grubby paws, and Alice as an Arab physician curing the
+plague, represented by blobs of paint-water on the rigid arms of Robert.
+How beloved will be the grown-up who, passing by the scene, shall
+refrain from commenting on the deafening groans of the patient, and
+shall, instead, offer the physician a ribbon for his girdle or a plume
+from the dusting brush for his turban.
+
+Exploring plays and all the plays which include wigwams and war paint
+are such as an intelligent grown-up will be able to intensify and add
+backbone to--for a child's fancy will naturally outrun his performance,
+and though he may imagine a feather head-dress or moccasins, he will be
+only too pleased that a grown-up should make the things for him with
+that strong, unerring touch to which his small experimenting hands
+cannot yet attain. All such games require numbers; your only lonely
+child cannot play Indians to the full. Two is better than one and more
+than two is better than two, up to the number of six or eight. People
+don't seem to see how important numbers are for play. They see it fast
+enough when it comes to schools, but a regular association of children
+for the purposes of play is not encouraged. In a large family of boys
+and girls it just happens happily, but an association of children from
+various homes generally means a predatory horde of boys: girls don't
+associate with unrelated girls in joyous play-adventures, and boys are
+apt to think that little girls who are not their sisters are either
+angels or muffs, and neither a muff nor an angel is what you want to
+play games with. Parents and guardians might do a great deal to render
+play-association possible: I suggest that house parties of children,
+where the utmost possible liberty should be given, would stimulate
+enormously the plays which encourage daring and initiative, and would
+teach boys that girls are not necessarily muffs or angels, and teach
+girls that boys are not all brutes.
+
+Fathers and mothers sacrifice themselves every year in August; you see
+them doing it, heavily, definitely, with clenched teeth and a grim
+determination not to be selfish, and to spend a month with the children
+at the seaside, however much it may cost in time, temper, and money. The
+Browns go to Scarborough, their friends the Robinsons go to Wales, the
+Smiths are in Devonshire and the Joneses at Littlehampton. They all go
+to the same sort of lodgings, do the same sort of things, and lucky is
+the mother whose nerves are not worn very thin indeed before the holiday
+ends. Now suppose all these worthy and self-sacrificing parents agreed
+to pool their families and let Mr. and Mrs. Brown take charge of them
+all--in some jolly big house suited to the needs of so swollen a
+household. Sixteen children are really, in many ways, four times easier
+to manage than four--and at least forty times as easy to amuse. In fact,
+you don't need to amuse them--they will amuse themselves and each other:
+Mr. and Mrs. Brown will only have to adjust ebullitions.
+
+Meanwhile the Smiths, Robinsons, and Joneses are having their holiday
+where they will. Their turn of having the children will come another
+year, when the Browns will be free to range the world in August, knowing
+that their children are safe and happy and are, thank you, having a much
+better time than they could have in small seaside lodgings, even with
+the undivided attention of their fathers and mothers. Besides, if I may
+for once take the part of the mothers instead of that of the children,
+what sort of holiday do you think the mother has, when to the ordinary
+routine of housekeeping at home are added the difficulties of
+housekeeping in unfamiliar surroundings, in a house of whose
+capabilities she has no experience, and with a landlady whose temper, as
+often as not, is as short as her tale of extras is long? The woman who
+works all the year round at the incredibly arduous task of making a
+home, answering week in and week out the constant, varying demands on
+all her complex mental and physical activities, does really deserve a
+real holiday. What is more, she needs it. She will be a better mother
+the rest of the year if she be allowed for that one month to be just a
+wife, and a wife on a holiday. The wife whose turn it is to take charge
+of the amalgamated families will find so great a change from the
+exclusive care of her own chickens that the change in itself will be a
+sort of holiday. And the children themselves, perhaps, will learn a
+little from the enforced separation from the fount of unselfish
+devotion, and appreciate their mother all the more if they have, be it
+only half-consciously, missed her a little even through the varied and
+joyous experiences of their month's house-party.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Building Cities
+
+
+THE devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of
+aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write
+that epic. Give me leave, however, to say that of all the heroic acts of
+the devoted aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than the
+self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful ladies to settle themselves
+down to play, in cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games bought
+at a shop, games in boxes. I am not talking of croquet, or even
+badminton, though these may be, and are, bought in boxes at shops. Nor
+do I wish to depreciate chess and draughts, nor even halma, the poor
+relation of draughts and chess, nor dominoes, which we all love. These
+games, so precious on wet days, or when other people have headaches,
+cannot be too highly prized, too assiduously cultivated.
+
+The rigours of the seaside holiday, too often in wet weather a time of
+trial and temper, would be considerably mitigated if chess and
+chess-board, draughts, dominoes, and halma were packed in the trunks
+along with the serge suits, the sandshoes, and the sun-bonnets. The
+games which I do so 'wonder and admire' to see aunts playing are the
+meaningless games with counters and dice: ill-balanced dice and roughly
+turned counters and boards that look like folding chequer-boards till
+you open them, and then you find all the ugliest colours divided into
+squares and circles or slabs, with snakes or motors or some other
+unpleasing devices on them. These games are all exactly the same in
+their primary qualities: the first of them that was invented had all the
+faults of all its successors. Yet dozens of new ones are invented every
+year, just to sell, and helpless children try to play them, knowing no
+better, and angel aunts abet them, knowing all.
+
+Grown-ups suffer a great deal in playing with children: it is not the
+least charm of a magic city that a grown-up can play it and suffer
+nothing worse than the fatigue incidental to the bricklayer's calling.
+Of course, most grown-ups will say that they would rather be burnt at a
+slow fire, or play halma, than be bothered with magic cities. But that
+is only because they do not understand. Try the experiment the next
+time you are spending a wet week-end in a country house where there are
+children. Get the children to yourself and ask your hostess whether you
+may borrow what you want for a game. The library is the best place for
+building: there is almost certainly a large and steady table: also there
+are the books. I need not urge you to spare the elegantly bound volumes,
+and the prized first editions, and the priceless folios and duodecimos
+in their original calf and vellum. You will find plenty of books that
+nobody will mind your using--the old _Whitakers_, bound volumes of the
+_Cornhill_ and _Temple Bar_--good solid blocks for the foundations of
+your city. If there be a pair of candlesticks or an inkstand which
+match, you may make a magnificent archway by setting up the candlesticks
+as pillars and laying the inkstand on the top. You can see how this is
+done in the picture of the Elephant Temple. Get the children to bring
+down the bricks and enlist a friendly parlour-maid to let you have the
+run of the china cupboard, or a footman, if you are in that sort of
+house, to bring you the things you want on a tray.
+
+[Illustration: THE PALACE OF CATS.
+
+120]
+
+But it is much better if you can go alone over the house and choose what
+you really want. You invite the children to help you build, and to
+build themselves. If they have never built a magic city you will find
+that they will presently desert their plain brick edifices to watch the
+development of your palace or temple. They will offer suggestions, and
+quite soon they will offer objects. They will begin to look about the
+room with their sharp eyes--and about the house with their keen memory
+and imagination, and produce the sort of things that look like the sort
+of things they think you might like for your building. They will wander
+off, returning with needle-cases, little boxes, shells--and "Would this
+do for something?" is the word on every lip. They are soon as much
+absorbed in the building as you are--and I take it you are an
+enthusiast--and your magic city grows apace. Then after a little while a
+grown-up, bored and out of employment, will stray into the library with
+"Hullo! what are you kids up to with all this rubbish?" and stand with
+his hands in his pockets contemplating the building industry. If you
+answer him simply and kindly, and don't resent his choice of epithet, it
+is almost certain he will quite soon withdraw a hand from his pocket and
+reach out to touch your magic walls with "Wouldn't it be better like
+that?" Admit it, and in hardly any time at all you have him building on
+his own account. Another grown-up will stray in presently with the same
+question on his lips. He too will come to be bored and will remain to
+build, and by tea-time you will have collected every grown-up of the
+house-party--every grown-up, that is to say, with the right feeling for
+cities. It will surprise you to find how keen you will yourself become
+as the work goes on, and how it will call into play all your invention
+and your latent craftsmanship.
+
+You will be amazed at the results you can achieve with quite
+dull-looking materials, and still more will you be surprised at the
+increasing interest and skill of the grown-ups. When it is time to dress
+for dinner you will feel a pang of positive despair at the thought that
+your beautiful city, the child of your dreams and skill, must be taken
+down. It is like the end of the magic of Cinderella when her coach
+became a pumpkin, her horses mice and her coachman a fat rat. Now your
+domes are once more mere basins, your fountain basins are ash-trays,
+your fountains are but silver pen-cases and their gleaming waters only
+strips of the tin-foil that comes off chocolate or cigarettes. The walls
+of your palaces go back into the book-cases, and their façades return to
+the dull obscurity of the brick-boxes. The doors and the animals who
+stood on guard at the door-ways and terraces, on plinths or pillars,
+share in the dark rattling seclusion where many a wooden tail has been
+broken, many a painted ear lost for ever, but the tidying up has to be
+done: unless your hostess is one of those rare and delightful people who
+see what their guests like and lets them do it. In that case she may say
+"Oh! what a pity to disturb the pretty thing! Why not let your city
+stay for a day or two, so that the children can build some more to it
+to-morrow. No, of course it won't be in the way--and wouldn't it be
+pretty if we lighted it up with fairy lights after dark?"
+
+Then your city really has a chance. The children will think of it till
+bed-time and fall asleep in the happy throes of their first
+town-planning.
+
+You may think that I exaggerate the charms of magic cities, because I
+happened to invent them, and you may be afraid that my swan, if you ever
+make up your mind to adopt it, may turn out to be an ugly and
+dispiriting duckling. I assure you this is not so. I have never met a
+child who did not like building magic cities, and not many grown-ups. Of
+course the love of them grows, like other loves, and the longer you can
+keep the city standing, the fonder you and your playmates will get of
+it. It will grow more and more finished in detail, and the ugly
+make-shifts will be reorganised and made neat with an irreproachable
+neatness. If the magic city game were played in schools, as I think it
+ought to be, a long table--or series of tables--could easily be kept for
+it, and the city kept standing and be added to from day to day. But it
+will not be the same sort of city as the one you build in the house
+where the parlour-maid lives and still less the sort that happens in
+the house where there is a butler and many silver boxes and cups and
+candlesticks.
+
+Now I come to write all this down it seems very trivial, and it will
+perhaps seem even more so when I come to tell you about the different
+things we made and used for magic cities. But it is not really trivial.
+I do not think I claim for the magic city game more than it justifies,
+and I will tell you, presently, why I think this. Of course, when you
+have finished your city, if you ever do finish it, you make up stories
+about it, and always, even when you are building it, you imagine how
+splendid it would be if you were small enough to walk through the arches
+of your city gates, to run along the little corridors of your city
+palaces. Of course, it would do quite as well if your city became big
+enough for you to run about in while still keeping your natural
+size--but it is somehow not really so cosy to think of.
+
+When I had built my first three or four magic cities this idea of
+getting into the city--being, of course, correct citizen-size--lived
+with me so much that I wrote a story-book about it called _The Magic
+City_,[A] in which a boy and girl do really become the right size and
+enter into the city they have built. They have there all the adventures
+whose wraiths danced before me when I was building courts and making
+palm trees and finding out the many fine and fair uses of cowries and
+fir-cones.
+
+This book, _The Magic City_, produced a curious effect. I hope I shall
+not look conceited (because really I am only proud) when I say that
+about my books I have had the dearest letters from children, saying
+pretty things about the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of the
+most heart-warming things in the world to get these letters and to
+answer them. And if I had letters like these I should have been only
+pleased and not disturbed. But the letters about the Magic City, though
+they were full of the pretty, awkward, delicious things that children
+write to the author of the books they like, held something else--a
+demand, severe and almost unanimous, to know how magic cities were
+built, and whether "children like us" could build one, and, if so, how?
+I got so many of these letters that I decided to build a magic city
+where any child, in London at any rate, could come and see it. And I
+built it at the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the _Daily News_
+arranged last year at Olympia. The history of that building would make
+a largish and intimate volume. The difficulties that beset a
+home-dweller when she goes out into the world, the anguish of
+misunderstandings which arise between the builder of magic cities and
+the people who lay linoleum and put up electric lights, the confusion
+which results from having packed in boxes and all mixed up the building
+materials which you are accustomed to look for as you need them in your
+own home, the extraordinary mass of people, the extraordinary kindness
+of people; for after all, it is the kindness which stands out. It is
+true that the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed the electric
+lights, behaved exactly like an earthquake, upsetting two temples, a
+palace, and a tank with an educated seal in it. But then how more than a
+brother was the man who did the whitewash! It is true that the dictator
+with the linoleum--but I will not remember these things. Let me remember
+how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a
+great personage of the _Daily News_ came with his wife at the last
+despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their
+dining-table, how the Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get me some
+cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me
+fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my
+silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home
+hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot
+Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's
+bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the
+Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day
+and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in
+the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and
+talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the
+Deity from the _Daily News_ looked on benign.
+
+These are things I can never forget. When the show opened I was feeling
+like a snail who has inadvertently come out without his shell. Think how
+all this kindness comforted and protected me. And then came the long
+stream of visitors--crowds of them--I don't know how many thousands, who
+came and looked at my magic city and asked questions, and looked and
+looked at it, looked and said things. It is because of what they said
+that I am writing about that show at all. They all liked the city except
+two, and I cannot think that those two were, in other respects, really
+nice people. And more than half of them asked whether I would not write
+a book about the magic city which I had built there, and which lay
+looking so real and romantic under the soft glow of the tinted lamps:
+not a story-book, but a book to tell other people how to make such
+cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in a book. And when I came to
+write I found that there were many other things that I wanted to write
+about children, and other things than magic cities, and I wrote them,
+and this is the book.
+
+And the reason I am telling you all this is that my big magic city at
+Olympia showed me, more than anything else could have done, that the
+building of magic cities interests practically every one, young or old.
+
+It is very difficult to say all this and yet not to feel that you will
+think that I am boasting about my magic city. But I want you to believe
+that it was very beautiful, and that you can build one just as beautiful
+or much more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such an easy game.
+Every one can play it. And every one likes it--even quite old people. By
+the way, I have been asked to build another city at Olympia in April,
+and I hope that it will be a prettier one even than the other which I
+loved so.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] Macmillans.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Bricks--and Other Things
+
+
+IT is a mistake when you are going to build a city to make too large a
+collection of building materials before you begin to build. If it is
+natural to you to express yourself by pencil lines on paper you might
+perhaps draw an outline of the masses of your city as you see them in
+the architect's vision or illumination which should precede all
+building, either of magic cities or municipal cab-shelters. Having
+roughly indicated on paper the general shape of your city as you look at
+it from the front--the shape it would have against the western sky at
+dusk (I think architects call this the elevation, don't they?)--you
+proceed to collect such material as will roughly indicate that shape on
+the table or other building-place. And here let me once more warn the
+builder new to his business not to be trapped by the splendid obvious
+bait of floor's wide space. To build palaces while prone on the stomach
+may be natural and easy to extreme youth. To grown-up people it is
+agonising and impossible. The floor has only two qualifications as a
+building site. It is large--larger at least than any of the pieces of
+furniture which stand on it--and it is flat. And when you have said that
+you have said all. Whereas the inconveniences of the floor as a place
+for building are innumerable. The floor is draughty, it is inaccessible,
+except from the attitude of the serpent, and the serpent's attitude,
+even if rich in a certain lax comfort, is most unfavourable for the
+steady use of both hands. If you want to see how unfavourable assume
+that attitude and try to build a card-house on the floor. You cannot do
+it. If you kneel--well, you know how hard the floor gets if you kneel on
+it for quite a little time; if you sit or squat your dress or your
+coat-tails insist on playing at earthquakes with your building. Also the
+city on the floor is liable to hostile invasion by cats or dogs or
+servants: to the crushing and scattering by short-sighted outsiders or
+people who rush into the room to look for something in a hurry. Think of
+a playful elephant in some Eastern court of carved pearl and ivory
+lattice; an elephant co-inciding with one of the more fanciful volcanic
+eruptions, and your conception will pale into placidity in the face of
+the spectacle of a normal puppy in a floor-built city. And on the floor
+things not only get broken, they get lost. Cotton reels roll under
+sofas, draughts bowl away into obscurity and are only found next day by
+the housemaid when she moves the fender, and not then, as often as not;
+chess kings are walked on and get their crowns chipped; card counters
+disappear for ever, and it is quite impossible for you to keep an eye on
+your materials when you are grovelling among them. Therefore build on a
+table--or tables. Tables of different shapes, heights, and sizes make
+beautiful sites for cities. And bureaux are good, if you may take the
+drawers out and empty the pigeon-holes. I remember a wonderful city we
+made once: it was called the "City of the Thousand Lights," and it was
+built on a bureau, two large tables and three other smaller ones, all
+connected by bridges in the handsomest way. (The lids of the brick boxes
+make excellent bridges and you can adorn them to your fancy, and make
+impressive gate-houses at each end.) The bureau was the Temple of Mung,
+and we sacrificed a pale pink animal from the Noah's Ark at the shrine
+of this, the most mysterious of the Gods of Pegana. The thousand
+lights--there were not a thousand, really, but there were many luminous
+towers, with windows of a still brighter glow. You make them by putting
+a night-light in a tumbler--a little water first by way of fire
+insurance--and surrounding the tumbler by a sheet of paper with windows
+and battlements and fixed to a cylindrical shape by pins. The paper
+cylinders are, of course, fitted on outside the tumblers so that there
+is no danger of fire. All the same it is better to let a grown-up do the
+luminous towers.
+
+[Illustration: GUARDED ARCH.]
+
+Having chosen your site and blocked out the mass of your buildings, you
+begin to collect the building material. For my own part I see the city I
+am going to build in the eye of the mind--or of the heart--so vividly
+and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know
+when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I
+pull it down. Truly in accord it never really is, but it approximates.
+
+Now when you have seen the silhouette of your city and begin to look for
+stuff to build with, you will instantly find that everything you can lay
+your hands on is too small. The bricks, even the boxes which contained
+them, are suited for the detailed building which is to come later, but
+now you want something at once bigger and less conventionally
+proportioned. Now is the time to look for boxes--not the carved
+sandal-wood boxes in which aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth
+cedarwood boxes in which uncles buy their cigars, though both these are
+excellent when you come to the details of your work, but for the mass
+you want real big boxes; if you have a large table, or tables, Tate's
+sugar boxes are not too large. Also there are the boxes in which starch
+is packed, and cocoa, and the flatter boxes which the lady at the
+sweet-shop will give you if she likes you, and sell to you for a penny
+anyhow. The boxes in which your father gets his collars, and the boxes
+in which your mother gets her chocolates, though not really large,
+should be collected at the same time, because they need the same
+treatment. I am assuming now that you are not building a city for an
+afternoon's amusement, but one for which you have found a safe resting
+place--a city that may take days to build and will not be disturbed for
+days. If you can once found your city in a safe place, and you are
+working at it day after day, you will go on thinking of more and more
+things to be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under your hands as
+naturally as a flower under the hand of summer.
+
+[Illustration: BOXES.]
+
+You have now your collection of boxes--but they are of plain, rough
+wood, and probably disfigured by coarse coloured printed papers telling
+what the boxes once held. These papers you wash off, and when the boxes
+are clean and dry, you paint or colour-wash them to suit your
+requirements. Now your requirements are large blocks of colours to match
+your bricks, and bricks are of three colours--white, terra-cotta, and
+stone colour.
+
+The stone bricks are stone colour and terra-cotta--oak bricks are very
+nearly stone colour--and there are white-wood bricks. To these three I
+would add a dark brown; and as this dark brown is not sold in boxes at
+the shops, you had better colour some of your bricks with it for
+yourself. Dark wood in a city gives a wonderful richness and helps the
+lighter colours more than you would think possible. A city in which some
+buildings are of dark wood will have an air of reality never achieved by
+a city where all is red or white or stone colour. By the way, among the
+stone bricks there are some blue ones, but you will always have enough
+of them, for they are the last things you will ever want to use.
+
+Your boxes then must be coloured either white, red, stone colour, or
+dark brown. In the white use either white paint--flat, not shining, or
+if that cost too much trouble and money, whitewash made of whitening,
+size, hot water and a pinch of yellow ochre or chrome powder to give it
+a pleasant ivory creaminess. There should be a good deal of size so that
+the whitewash does not come off on every thing.
+
+The red boxes can be painted to match the red bricks, or colour-washed
+(whitewash as before, but red ochre for colour).
+
+Stone colour is not a very satisfactory tint and too much of it makes
+for gloom. The lids and bottoms of the brick boxes will generally give
+you as much of it as you want. But if you desire stone colour you can
+make it by putting a pinch of raw umber in the whitewash. Or you can
+paint your boxes with this uninteresting tint--resembling the doors of
+back kitchens. With these paints or colour-washes you can make your odd
+many-shaped boxes into smooth-surfaced blocks to match your bricks: and
+not only wooden, but cardboard boxes can be treated in this way. All
+these colours can be bought in gigantic penn'orths at the oil-shops. But
+when I come to the dark brown, which I confess is my favourite colour,
+no cardboard box will serve your turn. You must choose clean, smooth
+wood, because the brown colouring is transparent, and the grain will
+show through. Your bricks will be smooth enough, and if the boxes are
+not smooth a little sand-paper will soon subdue their rough exterior. I
+suppose you know how to use sand-paper? If you just rub with your
+fingers you hurt your fingers and don't make much progress; the best way
+is to wrap the sand-paper round a flat piece of wood--a wooden brick
+will do--and rub with that.
+
+When your wood is all smooth you mix your stain. And here I make a
+present to all housewives of the best floor stain in the world. Get a
+tin of Brunswick black--the kind you put on stoves--and some turpentine.
+Mix a little of the black and a little of the turpentine in a pot and
+try it on the wood with a smooth brush--a flat brush is the best--till
+you have the colour you want, always remembering that it will be a
+little lighter when it is dry. When you have decided on the colour,
+paint your bricks and boxes on five out of their six sides lightly and
+smoothly, keeping to the grain of the wood, and not going over the same
+surface twice if you can help it. This is why a flat brush is the best:
+it will go right down the side of a brick and colour it at one sweep.
+Then stand each brick up on end to dry. When it is dry you can paint the
+under bit on which it has been standing. While you have stains and
+colours going it is well to colour some of your arches, and also such
+things as cotton-reels, and the little wooden pill-boxes that you get at
+the chemist's. Before colouring these boxes fill them with sand or
+stones and stick the lids on with glue. Otherwise they will not be heavy
+enough to build with happily.
+
+This painting or colouring should be done out of doors, or in an
+out-house, if possible. If you have to do it in the house spread several
+thicknesses of newspaper before you begin, and make a calm resting place
+for your painted things where they can dry at leisure and not be
+scarred with the finger-marks of her who "clears away."
+
+The earnest builder will keep a watchful eye on any carpentering that
+may go on in the house, and annex the smaller blocks of wood cut off the
+end of things, which, to an alien eye, are so much rubbish, but which
+are to the builder stores of price.
+
+If there are a few shillings to spare, the carpenter will, for those few
+shillings, cut you certain shapes which you cannot buy in shops--arches
+of a comfortable thickness and of satisfying curves, and slabs of board
+for building steps. These should be of varying lengths and thicknesses
+and made in sets of twelve steps, with two boards to each step,
+twenty-four slabs to a set. The biggest might be 1 in. thick and the
+bottom and largest slabs 12 by 6 in., lessening to 6 by 1 in. The next
+set might be ľ in., and of corresponding proportions, then ˝ in., then Ľ
+in. The two basic slabs of the ľ in. would be 9 by 4˝ in., and those of
+the ˝ in. would be 6 by 3 in. A set with Ľ in. steps (the basic slabs 3
+by 1˝ in.) would complete the set. Flights of steps of many varying
+heights and sizes could be built with these slabs. Ask the carpenter--if
+the shillings are forthcoming--to save for you the curved pieces of
+wood which come out of the arches. They are very useful for the bases
+of pillars, for towers and for the pedestals of statues or vases. Some
+of the arches, steps, and blocks should be coloured to match the red,
+white, and brown bricks.
+
+[Illustration: ARCHES AND PILLARS.]
+
+Some of the boxes, particularly the larger ones, should have doorways
+sawn in them on opposite sides--it is pleasant to look _through_ a
+building and see the light beyond; and if you are a thorough builder you
+can make a pillared interior which will delight the eyes of those who
+stoop down and peer through the doorway. A few narrow, oblong windows,
+high up, will also be useful. You need not show them unless you wish:
+you can always conceal them by a façade of bricks.
+
+[Illustration: PILLARED COURT.]
+
+Another pleasant use of a big box is to cut out the top and sides and
+make a columned court of it, which, when cream-washed, dignifies your
+city with almost all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
+Rome. The columns are cut from broom-handles--twopence each at the
+oil-shop, or, in the case of smaller boxes, from those nice round smooth
+wooden sticks which cost a penny and are used in ordinary life to thread
+window-blinds on.
+
+If you are going to make a city which is to stand for some time, a
+little thin glue is a good help to stability. If it is only a
+here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow city, Plasticine is good--the least touch
+of it seeming to make things safe which otherwise might totter to their
+ruin. But except as mortar Plasticine should be shunned. It is not good
+as a building material.
+
+Having now your bricks, boxes, arches, steps, and rounds, you may begin
+to block out your building. Quite soon you will begin to find that
+everything is too rectilinear. Even the arches and the rounds and the
+pillars and the pill-boxes cannot satisfy your desire for curves. This
+is the moment when you will begin to look about you for domes. And the
+domes, on the instant of their imposition in your building, will call
+out for minarets. It is then that you will wander about the house
+seeking eagerly for things that are like other things. Your search will
+be magnificently successful, if only the lady of the house has given you
+a free hand, and you have been so fortunate as to secure the sympathies
+of the kitchen queen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The Magic City
+
+
+THE only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after
+all, the best magic in the world. The idea of it came to me when I was
+dissatisfied with the materials provided for children to build with, and
+I think it must be a really true idea, because wherever I have applied
+it, it has worked, and that, I am told, is in accordance with the
+philosophy of pragmatism and a characteristic of all great discoveries.
+You may build magic cities in homes of modest comfort, using all the
+pretty things you can lay your hands on. You may build them in the
+mansions of the rich, if the rich are nice people and love cities, and
+if the butler will let you have the silver candlesticks for pillars, and
+the silver-gilt rose-bowls for domes; and you could build one in the
+houses of the very poor, if the very poor had any space for
+building--build them there and not use a single thing that could not be
+begged or borrowed by an intelligent child, no matter how poor.
+
+Children love to build. I still think with fond affection, and I am
+afraid speak with tiresome repetition, of those big oak bricks which we
+had when we were children. They disappeared when we left the old London
+house where I was born. It was in Kennington, that house--and it had a
+big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and
+cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in
+the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that
+smelt like heaven. Our nursery was at the top of the house, a big room
+with a pillar in the middle to support the roof. "The post," we called
+it: it was excellent for playing mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at.
+The skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the stake. When we left
+that house we went to Brighton, where there was a small and gritty
+garden, where nothing grew but geraniums and calceolarias. And we did
+not have our bricks any more. Perhaps they were too heavy to move.
+Perhaps the Brighton house was too small for the chest. I think I must
+have clamoured for the old bricks, for I remember very well the advent
+of a small box of deal bricks made in Germany, which had indeed two
+arches and four pillars, and a square of glass framed in wood daubed
+with heavy, ugly body colour, and called a window. But you could not
+build with those bricks. So there was no building at Brighton except on
+the beach. Sand is as good as anything in the world to build with--but
+there is no sand on the beach at Brighton, only sandiness. There are
+stones--pebbles you call them, but they are too round to be piled up
+into buildings. The only thing you can play with them is dolls' dinner
+parties. There are plenty of oyster shells and flat bits of slate and
+tile for dishes and plates--and it is quite easy to find stones the
+proper shape and colour for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of
+mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince pies, pork pies, roast hare
+or calf's head. But building is impossible.
+
+In the courtyard of our house in France there was an out-house with a
+sloping roof and a flat parapet about four feet high. We used to build
+little clay huts along this, and roof them with slates, leaving a hole
+for a chimney. The huts had holes for windows and doors, and we used to
+collect bits of candle and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy the
+lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings till some one remembered
+us and caught us, and sent us to bed. That was the curse of our
+hut-building--the very splendour of the result attracted the attention
+one most wished to avoid. But clay was our only building material, and
+after the big bricks were lost I never had any more bricks till I had
+children of my own who had bricks of their own. And then I played with
+them and theirs. And even then I never thought of building magic cities
+till the Indian soldiers came.
+
+They were very fine soldiers with turbans and swords and eyes that
+gleamed in quite a lifelike way, riding on horses of a violently active
+appearance: they came to my little son when he was getting well after
+measles or some such sorrow, and he wanted a fort built for them. So we
+rattled all the bricks out of their boxes on to the long cutting-out
+table in the work-room and began to build. But do what we would our fort
+would not look like a fort--at any rate not like an Eastern fort. We
+pulled it down and tried again, and then again, but no: regardless of
+our patient energy our fort quietly but persistently refused to look
+like anything but a factory--a building wholly unworthy of those
+military heroes with the prancing steeds and the coloured turbans, and
+the eyes with so much white in them. So then I wondered what was needed
+to give a hint of the gorgeous East to the fort, and I perceived that
+what was wanted was a dome--domes.
+
+So I fetched some brass finger-bowls and lustre basins off the dresser
+in the dining-room and inverted one on the chief tower of our fort, and
+behold! the East began to sparkle and beckon. Domes called for minarets,
+and chessmen on pillars supplied the need. One thing led to another, and
+before the day was over the Indian horsemen were in full charge across a
+sanded plain where palm trees grew--a sanded plain bounded only by the
+edges of the table, along three sides of which were buildings that never
+rose beside the banks of Thames, but seemed quite suitable piles to
+reflect their fair proportions in the Ganges or the Sutlej, especially
+when viewed by eyes which had not had the privilege of gazing on those
+fair and distant streams.
+
+I learned a great deal in that my first day of what I may term romantic
+building, but what I learned was the merest shadow-sketch of the
+possibilities of my discovery. My little son, for his part, learned that
+a bowl one way up is a bowl, a thing for a little boy to eat bread and
+milk out of; the other way up it is a dome for a king's palace. That
+books are not only things to read, but that they will make marble slabs
+for the building of temples. That chessmen are not only useful for
+playing that difficult and tedious game on which grown-ups are so slowly
+and silently intent, or even for playing all those other games, of
+soldiers, which will naturally occur to any one with command of the
+pleasant turned pieces. Chessmen, he learned, had other and less simple
+uses. As minarets of delicate carved work they lightened the mass of
+buildings and conferred elegance and distinction, converting what had
+been a block of bricks into a pavilion for a sultan or a tomb for a
+sultan's bride.
+
+[Illustration: MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM.]
+
+There was a little guard-room, I remember, at the corner of our first
+city, and there has been a little guard-room at the corner of every city
+we have built since. In simple beauty, that little guard-room seemed to
+us then to touch perfection. And really, you know, I have not yet been
+able to improve on it. The material was simplicity itself: six books,
+five chessmen, and a basin; and you see here how the guard-room looked
+when it was done.
+
+[Illustration: THE GUARD-ROOM.]
+
+[Illustration: THE DOMINO DOOR.]
+
+There was a black box, I remember, standing on another box, with domino
+steps. It needed a door, and we made it a door of ivory with the double
+blank of the dominoes, and a portico of three cigarettes--two for
+pillars and one to lie on the top of the pillars and complete the
+portico. You have no idea how fine the whole thing looked--like a
+strong little house of ebony and ivory--a little sombre in appearance
+perhaps, and like a house that has a secret to keep, but quite fine. The
+palm trees we made out of pieces of larch and yew fastened by Plasticine
+to the tops of elder twigs--and elder twigs have a graceful carriage,
+not too upright and yet not drooping. They look very like the trunks of
+tropical trees. But if you have not elders and larches and yew trees to
+command, you can make trees for your city in other ways. For little
+trees in tubs we had southernwood stuck in cotton reels--these make
+enchanting tubs, and there are a good many different shapes, so that
+your flower tubs are pleasantly varied. Fir cones we found useful, too;
+they made magnificent _chevaux de frise_.
+
+[Illustration: LARCH PALM.]
+
+[Illustration: THE MAGIC CITY.
+
+152]]
+
+On the first day of building what we soon came to call magic cities we
+trusted to inspiration; there was no time for thought. And this day was
+perhaps the most interesting day of all--for we had everything to learn.
+One of the things which I learned was that this magic city game was an
+excellent training for eye and hand, as well as for the imagination and
+the more soothing of the domestic virtues. The eye is trained to
+perceive likenesses and differences in the shapes and colours of
+things--to notice, as I said, that a bowl is a dome wrong way up, and
+that cigarettes are like white pillars. A beautiful yet sinister temple
+might be built with cigars for pillars and cigar-boxes for pediments,
+if cigars were the sort of things you were ever allowed to play with.
+You see that yew and larch and elder can be made to look like palm
+trees, and that shrubs in tubs are really like sprigs of southernwood in
+cotton reels. You go about with eyes newly opened to form and colour:
+you look at every object in a new light, trying to see whether it is or
+is not like something else--something that can be used in your magic
+city. You notice that a door is much the same shape as auntie's
+mother-of-pearl card-case, and your architectural instinct, already
+beginning to develop, assures you that a pearly door would be a
+beautiful thing for a temple, if only auntie sees things in the same
+light as you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is straight and
+narrow, as a path leading to such a door might be, and that if you stick
+tiny tufts of southernwood or veronica into the holes along the ivory
+sides of your path, your path will run between two little green hedges.
+You will notice that books make colonnades darkly mysterious if the lids
+of the brick boxes are laid along the back and along the top, and that
+based on these solidly built colonnades your bricks and arches will rise
+in galleries of unexpected dignity and charm. The building itself, the
+placing of bricks and dominoes, and books and chessmen and bowls, with
+exactness and neatness, is in itself a lesson in firm and delicate
+handling, such a lesson as is impossible if you are building with bricks
+alone. The call on the imagination is strong and clear. A house--the
+meanest hut--cannot be built without a plan or without an architect,
+though the architect may be only a little child and the plan may be only
+a little child's dream. To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on
+another, to make a cairn, not a house. The plan for the magic city,
+then, gets itself dreamed--the child's imagination learns to know what
+the bowl will look like when it is upside down, and, presently, what
+sort of bowls and books and bricks are needed to give to the
+cloud-capped palace of its desire some shadow in solid fact perceptible
+to the senses. To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the
+despair of every artist. And even though the image be distorted--as in
+all works of art, even the greatest, it always must be--yet it is joy
+even to have created the poorest image of a dream.
+
+And in the labour of creation will blossom those domestic virtues which
+best adorn the home; patience--for it is not often that for the young
+architect dream and image even vaguely coincide at the first effort, or
+the second or the third; good temper, for no one can build anything in a
+rage. The spirit of anger is the enemy of the spirit of architecture.
+And besides, being angry may make your hand shake, and then nothing is
+any good. Perseverance too, without which patience is a mere passive
+endurance. All these grow strong while you build your cities and try to
+make visible your dream.
+
+I do not mean that a child building a city sees all of it at once--in
+every detail; I don't suppose even the heaviest of architects does that.
+But I mean that he sees the masses of it with the eye of the mind and
+arrives by experiment at the details that best suit those masses. If the
+glass ash-tray will not do, the tea-cup without a handle will--or
+perhaps the flower-pot saucer, or the lid of a cocoa-tin. . . . One must
+look about, and find something that _will_ do, something which when it
+is put in its place will seem the only possible thing. I don't know how
+real architects work, but this is how you work with magic cities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Materials
+
+
+YOU wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like
+other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house
+where beautiful things are. I will tell you afterwards what to do in the
+house where beautiful--or at any rate costly--things are not. It is best
+when the owner of the house is an enthusiastic member of the building
+party; then she will grudge nothing.
+
+In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver
+inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the
+pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a
+silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of
+your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be passed by, nor bronzes.
+A vase of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a
+flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or
+Egyptian gods that have lain a thousand years safe in their bronze amid
+the sands of the desert, cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in
+the shadow of the tent, and now decking the mantelpiece of the room you
+are looting. Little silver figures of knights in armour and what
+not--take them if you get the chance. Chessmen, too, as many as you can
+get, the carved ivory ones, of red and white, and the black and brown
+kind where the heads of the kings and queens are so like marbles and
+those of the pawns like boot-buttons; draughts too, and spillikins, and
+those little metal animals, heavy and coloured life-like, which you see
+on glass shelves in the fancy shop: take them too. They will serve other
+uses than those to which you will dedicate your Noah's Ark animals. Card
+counters, especially the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and dominoes,
+and the willow-pattern pots and a blue cup or so from the glass-fronted
+cupboard. Take all these, always giving preference to the things that
+you will not be asked to put back the same day. Little Japanese
+cabinets, tea-caddies of tortoiseshell or wood or silver, silver
+boxes--and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do not take the playing cards
+that people play bridge with: these are never quite the same after they
+have been used in magic cities, and the Queen of Hearts always gets
+lost. You can usually acquire odd packs of cards that nobody wants.
+Those with black and gold backs are the best. They make gorgeous
+pagodas, and a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it should be.
+
+In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps, at least you can in mine,
+brass finger-bowls, and the lids of urns and kettles from the
+dresser--egg-cups and mugs and basins of lustre and of blue. Also those
+very little pewter liqueur-cups from Liberty's, and the tumblers for
+your towers of light, if you are going to have any. The library will
+yield you books and atlases--very useful for roofs these last, if they
+do not slope too much from back to edge; if they do, you can get even
+with them by wedges of paper laid in on the thin side.
+
+But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground, and here you will
+make a good bag even in those houses where you are not allowed any of
+the treasures from the drawing-room or the dining-room.
+
+Tins--tins of all kinds and shapes, from the tin that once held Bath
+Olivers and its lesser brother where coffee once lived to the square
+smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard, pepper, and so forth.
+
+[Illustration: HONESTY PILLARS.]
+
+A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter, patty pans, and those
+little tall tins that you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden
+moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and swans upon pats of
+butter, the kitchen mortar, especially the big marble one, so heavy that
+cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware bowls and stewing-pots,
+the lids of tea-pots, clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and jars
+that have held jam--especially the brownish corrugated kind of jar--all
+these things and many more you may glean in a kitchen whose Queen is
+kind.
+
+One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever made was built of
+kitchen things, and bricks and the boxes of bricks, a few shells, and a
+few chessmen.
+
+The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very
+brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black
+_passe-partout_, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for
+binding pictures and glass together when you don't want to have
+picture-frames. On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver urn, a
+silver butter dish, and a silver jam-jar. A salt-cellar (wrong way up,
+with a white chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with _passe-partout_
+doors and windows stand at the base of the tower, and turrets are made
+of round bricks and draughts, with the chess castles on the top. The
+porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white chess king on it, and on each
+side two books with a binding of white and pale gold. Along the top of
+the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes; on these are two rounds that
+happened when the arches were being cut out. On these little pearl
+shells are glued, and little roofs of blue tiles complete the porch.
+Behind these more books, white and pale gold with marbled sides, lead up
+to the platform on which the great tin towers rise up against the snowy
+background (linen sheets over the backs of chairs). The lower building
+is of the boxes of bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large blue jar
+crowned with a silver egg-cup, a flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and
+some blue and white tiles. An Egyptian god stands at the corner of the
+upper and the lower building, and two green trees with white roses grow
+out of a tomb at the left. The pathway is of tiles edged with fir cones,
+and two rose-trees within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its beginning;
+the whole thing was blue and silver and black, and I wish I could show
+you a coloured picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up for
+you to see.
+
+The lower platform on the right is a box faced with silver seed-vessels
+of honesty, and the arches and court are red. The steps are made of
+blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red bricks and the water where
+the seal swims is silver paper. In front is a pavement made of
+mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside of the court is made of
+one large red tile with a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with
+a square board painted red, and counters laid on it.) The fountain in
+the middle is a brass match-box and the waters that rise from it are
+silver paper; but in the picture the water of the fountain seems to
+have been blown aside by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those
+desolate regions of snow." You can build just such another tower and
+castle with the things you have, but when once you start building you
+will most likely think of some other way, quite different from mine, and
+just as good.
+
+Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you have an uncle who is an
+architect he will have any number sent to him as samples, and he will be
+rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles are all eminent in other
+walks of life it is a pity, but you are probably friends with the man
+who papers and paints your house, or the man who comes when the pipes
+burst at Christmas, or the man who comes about the gas, or the man who
+knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen range. It will be strange if
+none of these can get you a few coloured tiles when once they know you
+want them. It is well, if you are a child with a taste for building, to
+take pains to become acquainted with all the men who come to your house
+to do interesting things with tools and wood and iron and lead. Quite
+apart from the joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes, and
+thinking how easy it would be to be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself,
+there are all sorts of things left over from their work which are of no
+use to them, but may be of much use to you. All sorts of screws and
+nails, for instance, these generous men will now and then bestow--little
+screws of dry colour, little pieces of brass, door-knobs and
+finger-plates, thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers, lengths of
+pleasantly coloured wall-paper--the wrong side of which, being plain,
+can be used for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful too,
+especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths--and cut _straight_. The
+sections make excellent and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of brass
+tubing are useful too--in fact, brass objects of all sorts deserve your
+careful consideration. Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must
+have a good deal of metal about it, as the cities in Atlantis did.
+
+As I write I see more and more clearly that a sharp distinction must be
+drawn between cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and cities
+that can be kept going and added to day by day for weeks. You may often
+be fortunate enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room and to use the
+spoils for a building that only lasts a day, but no one will strip her
+rooms of all the pretty things you want and let you keep them for weeks.
+Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must
+collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable
+workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your
+collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty
+and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will
+gradually amass the things you need. I know well enough that there will
+have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out
+all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the
+things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the
+building of cities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Collections
+
+
+[Illustration: TREES.]
+
+FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps
+of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably
+have. Odd chessmen--quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few
+pence--are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men
+are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and
+nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Glass drops off
+old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for
+grass plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very
+realistic grass lawns can be made by chopping up the long green grass
+that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up,
+and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you
+have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it
+all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you
+sprinkle your chopped grass thickly all over it and leave it to dry.
+Next day, _not before_, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over
+so that the loose grass falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your
+grass plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick
+wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and
+charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes
+good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard
+rose-trees of loofah--dyed green, and the stalks of long matches
+painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white
+immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large
+trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued
+on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be
+made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.
+
+Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool
+or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket
+bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten
+the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead
+piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back
+level, cut the stem.
+
+For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or
+marjoram make charming little trees.
+
+Shells are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of
+carving. Almost all shells will be useful in one way or another, but I
+have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly shells which you
+find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs
+of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly shells that lie on the
+rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly
+on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.
+
+[Illustration: THICK ARCHES.]
+
+Keep your shells in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the
+world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds
+of shells. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate.
+The work of sorting out the shells is very damping to the eager
+enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to
+keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the
+wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery
+things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in
+their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out
+at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.
+
+[Illustration: FAN WINDOW.]
+
+As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes
+you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to
+build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed,
+and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few
+more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice
+_exactly_ the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however
+small.
+
+I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan,
+framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with
+elephant tusk shells and others, and below with carved ivory card
+counters.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.]
+
+There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its
+floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a
+double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar--a wooden
+box--on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red
+fairy lights, hidden by buttresses from the human eye which peeps
+through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on
+the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red
+books--_Sheridan's Plays_, _Tom Jones_, and Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.
+The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a
+dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the
+ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk shells. There is a
+door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case
+of a much-loved aunt, who nobly contributed it to the Temple. Above this
+door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.
+
+And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden
+bricks. The other side shows between dark buttresses the red of the
+books, and towards the back of this side are small square
+buildings--wooden boxes stained brown--with brass domes and mysterious
+doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.
+
+The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark
+buttresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved
+chessmen. The gate is of pierced brass--two finger-plates for a door,
+and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which
+support a brass inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen.
+On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl--the kind that
+nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a
+brass rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid brass, crowned with a
+black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-knobs on them, and
+round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of
+dark bricks with chessmen on the top.
+
+In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden
+plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the space at the side are
+paved with mother-of-pearl.
+
+I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details
+are changed a little every time I build it.
+
+If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful
+pavement by pasting the shining pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece
+of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if
+you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to
+hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones,
+to show off, by contrast, the massive splendour of your Temple. These
+honesty pods are a most useful substitute for mother-of-pearl. You can
+paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean)
+or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard
+fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up.
+But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A grass
+garden with paths of honesty, or a shell-built fountain basin in the
+middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be
+afraid of open spaces. Have as many buildings as you like, and mass them
+together as you choose, but let there be open spaces. They will be to
+your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for
+frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a
+neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the
+qualities your city may possess.
+
+[Illustration: HONESTY ROOF.]
+
+There are cardboard models of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge,
+and the Temple at Jerusalem. These are interesting in themselves and it
+is good to put them together. The Temple, which is sold by the Religious
+Tract Society, is really beautiful, and when you have set it up it looks
+like a model in ivory. The bridge and the Cathedral are of dull brown
+pasteboard--but they are interesting for all that. But when you are
+tired of these things as models, parts of them can be used with great
+effect in your building, especially if you paint the brown ones with
+aluminium paint, or even whitewash them.
+
+In the foreground of the picture of the Astrologer's tower you will see
+a little house which doesn't look as if it belonged where it is. And no
+more it does. It was put in just to show you what these little cardboard
+buildings are like--it is one of the gate-houses of the Tower Bridge,
+and the little white house on the parapet above the steps in the picture
+of the silver towers is a little gate-house out of another model.
+
+When you are collecting shells, you will find smooth flat stones of
+pleasing colours. Collect them--the thinner the better--you can make
+mosaic floors of them, fastening them in their place with glue or a very
+thin layer of Plasticine. Fir-cones of all shapes and sizes are useful,
+from the delicate cones of the larch to the great varnished-looking
+cones that fall from the big pine trees on the Riviera; they call them
+pineapples there--_pommes-de-pin_--and they use them for lighting fires.
+But you can use them for the tops of towers.
+
+A little, and only a very little, red tinsel paper is good to use, for
+the backs of shrines. It gives a suggestion of the glow of hidden
+lamps--or, put as windows near the tops of towers, it suggests the glow
+of sunset falling on jewelled casements. You can get it, and also
+bundles of stamped strips of gold paper, which should be used very
+sparingly indeed, from Mr. Bousquet, of the Barbican, in London City.
+There are other things which could serve for part of your collection,
+but I have told about these in the chapter on poor children's cities,
+because the poorest child can get them. But they are desirable in any
+collection, such things as tobacco-tins, jam-jars, clothes-pegs, and the
+different kinds of common things that you can use for decorating the
+fronts and backs and sides of houses, if you have not enough bricks to
+build façades to them all. And remember always to make the backs of your
+houses as beautiful as the fronts. They may--and should--be plainer but
+not less beautiful. Do not be like the jerry-builders who spend all
+their decoration, such as it is, on the flat fronts of their villas, and
+leave the sides and back flat and ugly, and so that when you see the row
+of them from the railway they look miserable and dejected, as though
+they knew how ugly they were and were sorry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The Poor Child's City
+
+
+WHEN my city was built at Olympia a great many school-teachers who came
+to see it told me that they would like to help the children in their
+schools to build such cities, but that it would not be possible because
+the children came from poor homes, where there were none of the pretty
+things--candlesticks, brass bowls, silver ash-trays, chessmen, draughts,
+well-bound books, and all the rest of it--which I had used to build my
+city. So then I said I would build a city out of the sort of things that
+poor children could collect and bring to school. And I did. My friends
+Mr. Annis and Mr. Taylor, who were helping me to explain the city and
+show it to visitors, helped me with the building. We did it in a day,
+and it was very pretty--so pretty that the school-teachers who came to
+see it asked me to write a book to say how _that_ was done. And so I
+did.
+
+There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in
+our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy,
+their devotion. When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of
+the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance
+they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers
+and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all
+those who work for money--when we think how rich people have money to
+throw away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver collars, and eat
+chicken off china, while the little children of the poor live on bread
+and tea, and wear what they can get--often enough, too little--when we
+think of all these things, if we can bear to think of them at all, there
+is not one of us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if by our death
+we could secure for these children a fairer share of the wealth of
+England, the richest country in the world. For wealth, by which I mean
+money, can buy all those things which children ought to have, and which
+these children do not have--good food, warm clothes, fresh country air,
+playthings and books, and pictures. Remembering that by far the greater
+number of children of England have none of these things, you would, I
+know, gladly die if dying would help. To die for a cause is easy--you
+leap into the gulf like Curtius, or fall on the spears like Winkelried,
+or go down with your ship for the honour of your country. To lead a
+forlorn hope, to try to save one child from fire or water, and die in
+the attempt--that is easy and glorious. The hard thing to do is to live
+for your country--to live for its children. And it is this that the
+teachers in the Council Schools do, year in and year out, with the most
+unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody applauds or makes as
+much fuss as is made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten. In the face
+of enormous difficulties and obstacles, exposed to the constant
+pin-pricks of little worries, kept short of space, short of materials
+and short of money, yet these teachers go on bravely, not just doing
+what they are paid to do, but a thousand times more, devoting heart,
+mind, and soul to their splendid ambition and counting themselves well
+paid if they can make the world a better and a brighter place for the
+children they serve. If these children when they grow up shall prove
+better citizens, kinder fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than
+their fathers were, we shall owe all the change and progress to the
+teachers who are spending their lives to this end.
+
+And this I had to say before I could begin to write about how cities
+may be built of such materials as poor children can collect and bring to
+school.
+
+For I have to own that poor children live in such little crowded houses
+that there is no room for the building of cities, and in the courts and
+streets where they play they cannot build, for the passers-by would
+tumble over their cities, and the policemen would call it an
+obstruction. So if they have a city at all it must be where they have
+most of their pleasant plays--at school. Besides, the children I have in
+mind are so very poor, that no one child could possibly collect enough
+materials for a city. But a number of children could each of them bring
+a few things, and thus make up enough for the building. And in most
+schools there will be some children not quite so poor who can afford a
+penny or so for tinsel paper and the few things--colours, paints, and so
+on--that do not occur naturally in a house, even a well-to-do house.
+These, let us hope, will be able to furnish a few old chessmen, for
+there is nothing like chessmen for giving an air of elegance to domes
+and minarets. If you cannot get chessmen, small clothes-pegs are good.
+You can cut them in halves and then you have two kinds of minaret. They
+can be coloured red or dark brown, or, if your city seems likely to
+lack metal, you can paint them with gold or aluminium paint. They look
+well when cut shorter as the battlements of buildings, rather like halma
+men, but of handsomer and more rotund proportions. Your halma man as you
+buy him in a box is ever a bit of a starveling. If you cut your peg into
+three, the middle section will make short round pillars to support
+little galleries, the roof being a strip of mill-board or the lid of a
+narrow box.
+
+[Illustration: CLOTHES PEGS.]
+
+Cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes and shapes are always easy to
+get. These can be coloured as explained in another chapter, and little
+doors and windows cut in them. But be sparing of windows; too many
+windows detract from the dignity of your tower, and make it look like a
+factory. In poor schools there will not be many bricks, and something
+must be done to add variety to the façades of buildings when there are
+not enough bricks to cover or decorate your boxes. A good deal can be
+done with haricot beans, tapioca, and sago. Fasten the beans round the
+doorways and the windows with glue or seccotine or Plasticine. If you
+use glue let the bean-work be quite cold before you do anything else
+with it. "Next day" is an excellent rule. When the beans are quite
+firmly fixed, glue the surface all over and sprinkle _thickly_ with
+tapioca so that not a bit of the box shows. Leave the tapioca lying on
+the surface till _next day_, then turn it up; the loose tapioca will
+fall off and leave a pleasant rough-cast-looking surface. Round
+cardboard boxes, such as muff-boxes or biscuit-boxes make splendid
+towers treated in this way. If you cannot get the little round yellow
+periwinkly shells, maize is very good if you cut each grain flat with a
+sharp knife, and fix the grains with glue as pillars and arches. Tin
+boxes or round tins polished to silvery brightness, with doors and
+windows and crenellations of black _passe-partout_, can be built into
+palaces of astonishing splendour, as you can see in the picture of the
+silver towers. But always beware of too many windows. Other excellent
+towers are jam-pots: you can paint them any colour you like, but I
+advise you to stick to terra-cotta, cream colour, and dark brown. Very
+pretty towers can be made of white jam-pots with windows and doors and
+crenellation of gold paper. Only you should outline the gold with ink or
+dark stain to make it show up against the white. Basins that are cracked
+make good domes, and you can almost always get a cracked basin, however
+poor you are; tea-cups that have lost their handles, or had a piece
+bitten out of them, are also not hard to get, and the lids of teapots
+that are broken, and of saucepans that have been burnt through, come
+readily enough to the hand of the collector. Honey pots and the little
+brown jugs that cream is sold in are easy to come by, and make
+Moorish-looking domes for buildings.
+
+When once you begin to build, you will find that all sorts of things
+that before looked neither useful nor beautiful become both, when they
+are built into your city. Look at the bedstead-knobs in the Elephant
+Temple, and the pepper-pots and the tea-cups on the top of the tower of
+pearl and red.
+
+[Illustration: TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE.]
+
+Those children who are lucky enough to go into the country for a holiday
+can collect fir-cones and acorns; nicely shaped bits of wood are more
+easily come by in a country village than in a London slum. Acorns are
+most useful, both the acorn and the cup. A brown building with doors and
+windows outlined in acorn cups with their flat side set on with glue
+looks like a precious work of carved wood. If you can't get acorn cups,
+the shells of Barcelona nuts are good, but they are difficult to cut
+into the needed cup shape. The shells of pea-nuts on a stone-coloured
+building look like carved stones, but always the nutshell must fit its
+edges tightly and neatly to the surface and show as a little round neat
+boss. Your own observation will supply you with other little and
+valueless things, which will become valuable as soon as you stick them
+evenly and closely on a foundation of their own colour. The periwinkly
+shells and the maize grains look best on white wood. The shells of the
+cocoanut have a value all their own. The larger ones, sawn neatly in
+halves, make impressive domes for brown buildings, and half a small
+cocoanut shell will roof a cardboard box that has held elastic bands,
+and you can call it a thatched cottage or the hut of a savage chief. I
+called mine Cocoanut Cottage, and the Curator of my Botanical Museum
+lived there. The Chief Astrologer, of course, lived at the top of his
+tower, which was a photographic enlarging apparatus. Ponds and rivers
+can be made with the silver paper that comes off cigarettes, and I have
+made a very impressive tower with match boxes, painted black and piled
+one on another so that the blue side shows in front, with a touch of red
+at each side. Black windows if you like. If you cannot get any chessmen
+the pinnacles of your buildings must be clothes-pegs, acorns, and
+fir-cones, with a very occasional piece of lead pencil or short piece of
+brass tubing with an acorn or a fir-cone on the top. Fir-cones, too,
+look quite baronial stuck upright on the posts of gates--and they are
+good edging for paths and roads. Pill-boxes make nice little turrets,
+and cotton reels, coloured to match the bricks and the boxes, are the
+finest flower tubs in the world. With sprigs of evergreen stuck in them,
+or a little made rose-tree, they look quite life-like and convincing,
+especially if you paste a circle of brown paper on the top of the reel,
+to look like mould, before you stick your shrub in the hole so
+conveniently placed in the reel, apparently on purpose to have shrubs
+planted in it. Cotton reels with acorns or fir-cones on them are good on
+the top of gate-posts.
+
+[Illustration: COTTON REELS.]
+
+[Illustration: LATTICE WINDOW.]
+
+These are just a few of the things that poor children can get and the
+way they can use them. The moment you begin to build you will think of
+a hundred things that I have not thought of, and a hundred ways of using
+them that I should not have thought of trying.
+
+If you can so arrange the site of your city that it need not be
+disturbed, it will grow in beauty day by day, and you will presently
+have to name a day to satisfy the children who will want to bring their
+parents to see it. If you give a school party no other attraction will
+be needed, and you will find that neither children nor parents will tire
+of examining your city as a whole and in detail, exclaiming at its
+beauty and marvelling at its ingenuity. And the children will love it.
+And so will you.
+
+If you are disposed to take a little more trouble with your towers, you
+can cover them with cement, and mould the crenellations and windows with
+your fingers. The cement is made of newspaper, size, and whitening. Tear
+up two newspapers and boil them in four quarts of water for three hours.
+Then pound the paper in a large mortar, or squeeze it in your hands till
+it is all pulp. It will have an unpleasing grey colour at this stage,
+but in the end it will be creamy white. Then add equal quantities of
+size and whitening and a pinch of yellow ochre, mix thoroughly and let
+the mixture get cold, when it is ready for use. If it is too thin warm
+it again, and add more whitening, but do not let the mixture _boil_
+after the size has been added. When the mixture with which you have
+covered your tower is dry,--it takes some days--it will be as hard as
+stone. A cocoa tin set on a treacle tin makes a very neat tower, as you
+will see by the picture. Square towers can also be made in this way, by
+covering square tins with the cement. In fact, with a little trouble and
+some tins of different sizes and shapes you could build a whole palace
+in this way. Doors can be made of black paper, and lattices of paper cut
+and folded, with black paper behind it, as you can see for yourself by
+the picture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The End
+
+
+YOU will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children
+differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character
+and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of
+another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as
+though the needs of all children were the same. That is because, in the
+body of this work, I have been dealing with the needs of children as a
+genus, and not with those of the individual or species. There are
+certain needs common to all children, needs as universal as the need for
+food, raiment, warmth, and light. Such are the needs for sympathy and
+justice, leisure and liberty. These things are admitted by all but the
+driest economists to be the rights of adults, but not, alas! always
+admitted as the rights of children. And I have tried to show a little
+what it is that is essential to the true well-being of all children. The
+hungers and thirsts of the individual spirit cannot be dealt with by
+any but those in close relation to the individual child. I have tried to
+lay down broad outlines--to make suggestions, to point out pleasant ways
+leading to pleasant places. Parents, teachers, pastors and masters will
+make the application--or the variation--in every individual case.
+
+One of the things that is the matter with modern education is the
+absence of the conception of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character
+and temperament. For the matter of that it is this indifference to
+personality which makes the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain.
+Our education treats children as though they were all cast in one mould;
+it treats men and women as though they, in their sphere, differed not at
+all one from another. You will say that it is impossible, in a great
+country and a great school, to find out the personal tastes and wishes,
+hopes, dreams, powers, and possibilities of individuals, and you are
+quite right. That is why large schools and large communities fail so
+detestably in the very objects of their existence. Schools are intended
+to educate, and they merely instruct. Communities are, at least I
+suppose they are, intended to enable their members to live happy and
+useful lives as free citizens, and they only succeed in making slaves
+of the many and tyrants of the few. The machinery of government and the
+machinery of so-called education is too big--what it has to deal with is
+too big--for any fine result to be possible. If we are ever to get out
+of children, and men and women, anything like the best of which they are
+capable, we shall have to have much smaller schools and much smaller
+communities. Some sort of beautiful and useful corporate life is
+possible in a place the size of Bedford; it is not possible in a place
+the size of London. Ten or twenty children in a class can be treated as
+individual human beings, and the best that is in them drawn out by a
+sympathetic understanding of personal traits and characteristics. But a
+class of seventy or eighty must be treated as a machine of which the
+little live units are but wheels and cogs. It can, as a machine, be made
+to do certain things; the component parts of it can be made to
+contribute their share to the general result, even as the bright and
+helpless parts of a machine contribute to its activity. But you can
+never get out of the children composing such a class anything
+approaching the fine result which can be achieved by an education based
+on the broad lines of what is good for _children_, with a superstructure
+of delicate perception of what is good for the _individual child_.
+Dick, Tom, and Harry can join in certain lessons and certain games, but
+there will always be some matters in which Dick is not in the least like
+Tom, and Harry is quite different from both the others.
+
+The people who govern us talk about education--they talk greatly, and a
+little they do. But they will not do the one simple, straightforward
+thing which is as essential to the growth of the mind as vital religion
+is to the growth of the soul. Any teacher in any elementary school knows
+what is needed, but those in power do not know it. They will make
+scholarships as plentiful as blackberries, they will do all sorts of
+fine things for secondary education. The one thing they will not do is
+to _reduce the size of the classes_ in elementary schools. And so long
+as this is not done the millions we spend yearly on education are, to a
+pitiably great extent, millions wasted. We might almost as well take at
+least half the money, put it in bags, tie it up with red tape, and drop
+it over London Bridge, or, still better, spend the money in monthly
+exhibitions of free fireworks, which would at least give the children
+and the grown-ups one jolly evening in thirty.
+
+A small class can be taught, and taught well, by a teacher of as
+average ability as ever tumbled head over heels from London to York, but
+a large class your average teacher will never get at at all. It takes a
+genius and an orator to speak intelligibly to more than fifteen people.
+I sometimes wonder if teachers know how much of their teaching their
+scholars miss altogether--fail to see, fail to grasp, do not know is
+there. Between the careless or overworked teacher and the timid and
+rather stupid child there is a great gulf fixed. To such a child the
+voice of the teacher is the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
+crying quite aimlessly, in a wilderness of unintelligible jargon. Many
+boys--in public as well as elementary schools by the way--go through
+their whole school life "scraping through somehow," and never once
+having a clear idea of anything that they are doing, hardly ever a
+glimpse of what anything is about or that anything has any reasonable
+relation to anything else. It is rather like a miracle, whichever way
+you take it, but there it is, and a miracle which might be made
+impossible and unnecessary by a little sensible commonplace legislation.
+We want smaller classes, and we want those classes better taught. That
+is to say, we want more teachers, and better-paid teachers; we want our
+teachers to be placed in a position of certain comfort, that they shall
+not be living in the House of Poverty with the wolf of Worry always
+nosing round the door, distracting their attention from what should be
+their chief thought--for most of the months of the year. We want longer
+holidays, and a better provision for happiness in those holidays, both
+for teachers and children. We want every teacher and every child to have
+a real holiday, not merely an absence from school. In a word, we want
+more money spent on schools and less on gaols and reformatories. It
+cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her
+schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don't seem to mind
+so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they really hate seems
+to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending
+would pay us! "There is no darkness but ignorance," and we have now such
+a chance as has never been the lot of men since Time began, a chance to
+light enough lamps to dispel that darkness. If only we would take that
+chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It
+would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.
+
+Now that I have written the words I don't like the look of them; and
+looking back through this book, I see that most of what I have written
+applies to the kind of children who are in little danger of going to
+prison, children in comfortable homes, with enough of, at any rate,
+material well-being. Most of my book refers to the class that is not
+taught in Council Schools, and that will not be sent to a reformatory if
+the eighth commandment is not learnt in one lesson. This class is called
+the upper middle-class, and it does not go to the Council Schools
+because it has money to go elsewhere. The children of this class are, in
+brain and heart, not superior to the children of what are called the
+working classes. Place the middle-class children in the surroundings of
+the slum child, and thereupon the middle-class child would grow as the
+slum child grows, as the plant debarred from light grows--_not
+straight_. What we want is that there should be a distribution of wealth
+so changed from the one that now destroys the nation's balance as to put
+every parent in a position to pay for his child's education, and that
+the nation's schools should be so superlatively better than all other
+schools that no parent would dream of sending his child to any school
+but that provided by the nation for the nation's children.
+
+And now that it comes to good-bye, I am sorry to say it. I feel that I
+have only been touching the fringe of the greatest problem in the world:
+that there is very much which I have left unsaid, or which I might have
+said differently, and better. One might go on for all one's life
+thinking and writing about children and their needs, and always there
+would be more unsaid than said, less thought than food for thought. If
+the thoughts which I have striven to set forth give food for thought in
+others, if my little candle may help to kindle a great torch, I shall
+look back on the writing of this book as a great privilege and the
+memory of the hours spent on it I shall treasure with a glad and
+grateful heart.
+
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Varried hyphenation retained. Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Wings and the Child, by E. Nesbit.
+    </title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Wings and the Child
+       or, the Building of Magic Cities
+
+Author: E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+Illustrator: George Barraud
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2012 [EBook #38977]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS AND THE CHILD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[i]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>WINGS AND THE CHILD</h1>
+
+
+
+<div class='tnote'><b>Transcriber's Note:</b> Larger versions of the
+photographs of the houses may be accessed by clicking on the image.</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[ii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2>WORKS BY E. NESBIT</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Nesbit books">
+<tr><td align="center"><br /><b>CHILDREN'S BOOKS</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE MAGIC CITY</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE WONDERFUL GARDEN</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE MAGIC WORLD</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE RAILWAY CHILDREN</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">OSWALD BASTABLE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">HARDING'S LUCK</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE TREASURE SEEKERS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE WOULDBEGOODS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">FIVE CHILDREN AND IT</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE PH&#338;NIX AND THE CARPET</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE AMULET</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE ENCHANTED CASTLE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">NINE UNLIKELY TALES</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE HOUSE OF ARDEN</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE BOOK OF DRAGONS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">WET MAGIC</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><br /><b>FICTION</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">DAPHNE IN FITZROY STREET</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THESE LITTLE ONES</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">MAN AND MAID</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">SALOME AND THE HEAD</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE RED HOUSE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">DORMANT</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE LITERARY SENSE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">IN HOMESPUN</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">FEAR</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center"><br /><b>POETRY</b></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">LAYS AND LEGENDS. 1st Series</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">LAYS AND LEGENDS. 2nd Series</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">LEAVES OF LIFE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">A POMANDER OF VERSE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">BALLADS AND LYRICS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">JESUS IN LONDON</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">BALLADS AND LYRICS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">NEW POEMS</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[iv]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 374px;"><a id="frontis"></a>
+<img src="images/gs01.jpg" width="374" height="600" alt="frontis" />
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h1>
+WINGS AND THE CHILD</h1>
+<div class='center'>
+<b><span class='small'>OR</span></b><br />
+
+<b><span class='big'>THE BUILDING OF MAGIC CITIES</span></b><br />
+<br /><br /><br />
+<span class='small'>BY</span><br />
+<span class='author'>E. NESBIT</span><br />
+<span class='small'>AUTHOR OF</span><br />
+<span class='small'>"THE MAGIC CITY," "THE WOULDBEGOODS," ETC., ETC.</span><br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<span class='small'>WITH PICTURES BY GEORGE BARRAUD AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS</span><br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON<br />
+<span class='small'>NEW YORK AND LONDON</span><br />
+</div><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[vi]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class='copyright'><i>Printed in 1913</i></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2>TO THE READER</h2>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">When</span> this book first came to my mind it came
+as a history and theory of the building of
+Magic Cities on tables, with bricks and toys and
+little things such as a child may find and use.
+But as I kept the thought by me it grew and
+changed, as thoughts will do, until at last it
+took shape as an attempt to contribute something,
+however small and unworthy, to the
+science of building a magic city in the soul of
+a child, a city built of all things pure and fine
+and beautiful. As you read, it will, I hope,
+seem to you that something of what I say is
+true&mdash;in much, no doubt, it will seem to you that
+I am mistaken; but however you may disagree
+with me, you will, I trust, at least have faith
+in the honesty of my purpose. If I seem to
+you to be too dogmatic, to lay down the law
+too much as though I were the teacher and you
+the learner, I beg you to believe that it is in
+no such spirit that I have written. Rather it
+is as though you and I, spending a quiet evening<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
+
+by your fire, talked together of the things that
+matter, and as though I laid before you all the
+things that were in my heart&mdash;not stopping at
+every turn to say "Do you not think so too?"
+and "I hope you agree with me?" but telling
+you, straight from the heart, what I have felt and
+thought and, I humbly say, known about children
+and the needs of children. I have talked
+to you as to a friend, without the reservations
+and apologies which we use with strangers.
+And if, in anything, I shall have offended you,
+I entreat you to extend to me the forgiveness
+and the forbearance which you would exercise
+towards a friend who had offended you, not
+meaning to offend, and to believe that I have
+spoken to you as frankly and plainly as I would
+wish you to speak to me, were you the writer
+and I the reader.</div>
+
+<div class='sig'>
+<span class="smcap">E. Nesbit.</span><br />
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><i>PART I</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER I</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><span class='small'>PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Of Understanding</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER II</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">New Ways</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER III</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Playthings</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER IV</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[x]</a></span><span class="smcap">Imagination</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER V</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Of Taking Root</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VI</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Beauty and Knowledge</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VII</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Of Building and Other Matters</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VIII</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Moral Code</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER IX</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[xi]</a></span><span class="smcap">Praise and Punishment</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER X</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The One Thing Needful</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br /><i>PART II</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER I</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Romance in Games</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER II</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Building Cities</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER III</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Bricks&mdash;and Other Things</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_130">130</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER IV</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[xii]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Magic City</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER V</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Materials</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VI</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Collections</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VII</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Poor Child's City</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="center" colspan='2'><br />CHAPTER VIII</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The End</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[xiii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Illustrations">
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Portrait of the Author</span></td><td align="left"><i><a href="#frontis">Frontispiece</a></i></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><span class='small'>PAGE</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The King's Summer-House</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_8">8</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Not much Higher than the Table</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">He has Created the Engine</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Tomb in the Desert</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Stonehenge</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Tree like a Man</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Poppy Doll</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Doves and Dragon</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Astrologer's Tower</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Silver Towers</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Furniture to Live with</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Turquoise Temple</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Hall of Pearl and Red</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">A Chinese Temple</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Square Tower</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Shell Arches</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Handkerchief Tents</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[xiv]</a></span><span class="smcap">One Half of the City</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Tail of Puss</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Other Half of the City</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Hideous Disfigurement</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Of Lovely Hills and Dales</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Palace of Cats</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Guarded Arch</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_123">123</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Boxes</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_135">135</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Arches and Pillars</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_140">140</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Pillared Court</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_141">141</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Materials for the Guard-Room</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Guard-Room</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_149">149</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Domino Door</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_150">150</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Larch Palm</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Magic City</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Honesty Pillars</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Trees</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_166">166</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Thick Arches</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Fan Window</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Elephant Temple</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Honesty Roof</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_174">174</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Clothes Pegs</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Towers and Cocoanut Cottage</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Cotton Reels</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left"><span class="smcap">Lattice Windows</span></td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2><i>PART I</i></h2>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Of Understanding</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is not with any pretension to special knowledge
+of my subject that I set out to write down
+what I know about children. I have no special
+means of knowing anything: I do, in fact,
+know nothing that cannot be known by any one
+who will go to the only fount of knowledge,
+experience. And by experience I do not mean
+scientific experience, that is the recorded results
+of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung
+from observation; I mean personal experience,
+that is to say, memory. You may observe the
+actions of children and chronicle their sayings,
+and produce from these, perhaps, a lifelike
+sketch of a child, as it appears to the grown-up
+observer; but observation is no key to the
+inner mysteries of a child's soul. The only key
+to those mysteries is in knowledge, the knowledge
+of what you yourself felt when you were
+good and little and a child. You can remember
+how things looked to you, and how things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+looked to the other children who were your
+intimates. Our own childhood, besides furnishing
+us with an exhaustless store of enlightening
+memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity
+of our lives for the observation of children&mdash;other
+children. There is a freemasonry between
+children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take
+which is and must be for ever impossible
+between children and grown-ups, no
+matter how sympathetic the grown-up, how
+confiding the child. Between the child and the
+grown-up there is a great gulf fixed&mdash;and this
+gulf, the gulf between one generation and
+another, can never be really bridged. You
+may learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes
+in rare cases to lean very far across it so that
+you can just touch the tips of the little fingers
+held out from the other side. But if your
+dealings with those on the other side of the gulf
+are to be just, generous, noble, and helpful,
+they must be motived and coloured by your
+memories of the time when you yourself were
+on the other side&mdash;when you were a child full
+of your own hopes, dreams, aims, interests,
+instincts, and imaginings, and over against you,
+kindly perhaps, tenderly loving, often tenderly
+loved, but still in some mysterious way antagonistic
+and counting as "Them," were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+the grown-ups. I might say elders, parents,
+teachers, spiritual pastors and masters, but the
+word which the child himself uses seems to me,
+for all reasons, to be the best word for my use,
+because it expresses fully and finally the nature
+of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the
+people who once were children and who have
+forgotten what it felt like to be a child. And
+Time marks with the same outward brand
+those who have forgotten and those who do
+not forget. So that even the few who have
+managed to slip past the Customs-house with
+their bundle of memories intact can never fully
+display them. These are a sort of contraband,
+and neither the children nor the grown-ups will
+ever believe that that which we have brought
+with us from the land of childhood is genuine.
+The grown-ups accuse us of invention, sometimes
+praise us for it, when all we have is
+memory; and the children imagine that we
+must have been watching them, and thus surprised
+a few of their secrets, when all that we
+have is the secrets which were our own when
+we were children&mdash;secrets which were so bound
+up with the fibre of our nature that we could
+never lose them, and so go through life with
+them, our dearest treasures. Such people feel
+to the end that they are children in a grown-up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+world. For a middle-aged gentleman with a
+beard or a stout elderly lady with spectacles to
+move among other elderly and spectacled persons
+feeling that they are still children, and that the
+other elderly and spectacled ones are really
+grown-ups, seems thoroughly unreasonable, and
+therefore those who have never forgotten do
+not, as a rule, say anything about it. They
+just mingle with the other people, looking as
+grown-up as any one&mdash;but in their hearts they
+are only pretending to be grown-up: it is like
+acting in a charade. Time with his make-up
+box of lines and wrinkles, his skilful brush that
+paints out the tints and the contours of youth,
+his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders
+and pillows for the waist, disguises the actors
+well enough, and they go through life altogether
+unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world
+which to them has always been the child's
+world, the tired hands loose the earthly possessions
+which have, to them, been ever the toys
+of the child. And deep in their hearts is the
+faith and the hope that in the life to come it
+may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.</p>
+
+<p>Such people as these are never pessimists,
+though they may be sinners; and they will be
+trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up
+would call imbecility. To them the world will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
+be, from first to last, a beautiful place, and
+every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise,
+hurting them like a sudden blow. They will
+never learn prudence, or parsimony, nor know,
+with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up,
+the things that are or are not done by the best
+people. All their lives they will love, and
+expect love&mdash;and be sad, wondering helplessly
+when they do not get it. They will expect
+beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and
+splendours from a grown-up world which has
+forgotten what impulse was: and to the very
+end they will not leave off expecting. They
+will be easily pleased and easily hurt, and the
+grown-ups in grain will contemplate their pains
+and their pleasures with an uncomprehending
+irritation.</p>
+
+<p>If these children, disguised by grown-up
+bodies, are ever recognised for what they are,
+it is when they happen to have the use of their
+pens&mdash;when they write for and about children.
+Then grown-up people will call them intelligent
+and observant, and children will write to them
+and ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question,
+"How did you know?" For if they can
+become articulate they will speak the language
+that children understand, and children will love,
+not them, for their identity is cloaked with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There
+are some of these in whom the fire of genius
+burns up and licks away the trappings under
+which Time seeks to disguise them&mdash;Andersen,
+Stevenson, Juliana Ewing were such as these&mdash;and
+the world knows them for what they were,
+and adores in them what in the uninspired it
+would decry and despise.</p>
+
+<p>To these others who have the memories
+of childhood untainted and yet have not the
+gift and relief of words, to these I address
+myself in the first instance, because they will
+understand without any involved explanation
+on my part what it is that I am driving at, and
+it is these who, alone, can teach the real grown-ups
+the things which they have forgotten. For
+these things can be taught, these things can be
+re-learned. I would have every man and
+woman in whom the heart of childhood still
+lives, protest, however feebly and haltingly,
+yet with all the power of the heart, against
+machine-made education&mdash;against the instruction
+which crams a child with facts and
+starves it of dreams, which forces the free foot
+into heavy boots and bids it walk on narrow
+pavement, which crushes with heavy hand the
+wings of the soul, and presses the flower of
+imagination flat between the pages of a lexicon.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs02-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs02.jpg" width="600" height="379" alt="house" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE KING&#39;S SUMMER-HOUSE.</span>
+<div class='attrib'>8]</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>New Ways</div>
+
+
+<div class='unindent'>"<span class="smcap">What</span>," we ask with anxious gravity, "what
+is the best sort of teaching for children?" One
+might as sanely ask what is the best sort of
+spectacles for men, or the best size in gloves for
+women. And the blind coarse generalisation
+which underlies that question is the very heart
+and core of the muddled, musty maze we call
+education. We talk of the best sort of education
+for children, as we might talk of the best
+sort of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment
+for mice. Stoves are all alike, they vary
+in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is
+as the iron soul of the other. The polish that
+is good for one is good for all. Mice may, and
+do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood
+does not vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the
+inner nature, in the soul and self of it, each
+child is different from any other child, and the
+education that treats children as a class and not
+as individual human beings is the education<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
+whose failure is bringing our civilisation about
+our ears even as we speak.</div>
+
+<p>Each child is an explorer in a new country&mdash;an
+explorer with its own special needs and
+curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the
+explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths.
+The little free wild creatures would seek their
+meat from God: we round them into herds,
+pen them in folds, and feed them with artificial
+foods&mdash;drab flat oil cakes all alike, not considering
+that for some brown nuts and red
+berries, and for some the new clean green grass,
+may be the bread of life.</p>
+
+<p>Or, if you take the mind of a child to be a
+garden wherein flowers grow that might be
+trained to beauty, you bring along your steam-roller,
+and crush everything to a flat field
+where you may grow cabbages. It is so good
+for the field, you say&mdash;because you like
+cabbages.</p>
+
+<p>Liberty is one of the rights we claim for ourselves,
+though God knows we get little enough
+of it and use still less; and Liberty is one of
+the rights that a child above all needs&mdash;every
+possible liberty, of thought, of word, of deed.
+The old systems of education seem to have
+found it good to coerce a child for the simple
+sake of coercion&mdash;to make it do what the master<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+chose, to make it leave undone those things
+which it wished to do and to do those things
+which it did not wish to do&mdash;nay, more, wished
+violently and conclusively not to do. To force
+the choice of the teacher on the child, to override
+the timid natural impulses of the child
+with the hard hoofs of the teacher's individuality,
+to crush out all initiative, to force the young
+supple mind into a mould, to lop the budding
+branches, nip off the sensitive seeking tendrils,
+to batter down the child's will by the brute
+force of the grown-up will, to "break the
+child's spirit," as the cursed phrase used to run&mdash;this
+was, in effect, what education meant.
+There was a picture in <i>Punch</i>, I remember&mdash;at
+least I have forgotten the picture, but I
+remember the legend: "Cissy, go and see
+what Bobbie's doing, and tell him not to."</p>
+
+<p>It did not much matter what you made a
+child do, so long as it was something against
+the grain. He was to learn, not what he with
+his wonderful new curiosities and aptitudes
+longed to learn, but what you wished to teach;
+you with your dulled senses&mdash;dulled in the same
+bitter school as that in which he was now a
+sad learner.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 403px;">
+<img src="images/gs03.png" width="403" height="450" alt="table" />
+<span class="caption">NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Generation after generation has gone on,
+pounding away at the old silly game, each<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+generation anxious and eager to hurt the new
+one as it, in its time, was hurt. Each generation
+must, one would have thought, have
+remembered what things hurt children and how
+much these things hurt, and yet this intolerable
+cycle of bullying and punishment and repression
+went on and on and on. Children were bullied
+and broken&mdash;and grew up to bully and break
+in their turn. It must be that this was because
+the grown-ups did not remember. Those who
+have the care of children, who work for them,
+who teach them, should be those who do
+remember: those who have not forgotten what
+it feels like to be a child&mdash;any sort of child.
+For, though children are all different, there is
+a common measure among them as there is
+among men. A law for men cannot be good
+if it be made&mdash;as indeed but too often happens&mdash;by
+those who have forgotten what it used to
+feel like to be a man; and what sort of poetry
+do you get from one who has forgotten beauty
+and sorrow, and the Spring, and how it feels to
+be young and a lover? And if the people who
+have the care of children have forgotten what
+it feels like to be a child, those who do remember
+should remind them. They should be reminded
+how it feels to be not so very much higher than
+the table, how it feels not to be so clever as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+you are now, and so much more interested in
+so much more&mdash;how it feels to believe in things
+and in people as you did when you were new to
+the journey of life&mdash;to explore every road you
+came to, to trust every person you met. It is
+a long time ago, but can you not remember the
+days when right and wrong were as different as
+milk and mud, when you knew that it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+really wrong to be naughty and really good to
+be good, when you felt that your mother
+could do no wrong and that your father was the
+noblest and bravest of men? Do you remember
+the world of small and new and joyous and
+delightful things? Try to remember it if you
+would know how to help a child instead of
+hindering it&mdash;try to look at the world with the
+clear, clean eyes that once were yours in the
+days when you had never read a newspaper or
+deceived a friend. You will then be able to see
+again certain ideals, unclouded and radiant,
+which the dust of the crowded highway and the
+smears of getting-on have dimmed and distorted&mdash;quite
+simple ideals of love, faith, unselfishness,
+honour, truth. I know these words
+are often enough on the lips of all of us, but
+a child's ear will be able to tell whether the
+words spring from the lips or the heart. Look
+back, and you will see that you yourself were
+also able to distinguish these things&mdash;once.</p>
+
+<p>Education as it should be, the unfolding of
+a flower, not the distorting of it, is only possible
+to those who are willing and able themselves to
+become as little children.</p>
+
+<p>It is because certain great spirits have done
+this and have tried to teach others to do it,
+that reforms in education have begun to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+at least possible. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Signora
+Montessori and many a lesser star has shone
+upon a new path. And public interest has
+centred more and more on the welfare of the
+child. Books are written, societies formed,
+newspapers founded in the interests of the child,
+and true education becomes a possibility.</p>
+
+<p>And well indeed it is for us that this is so.
+For the education of the last three hundred years
+has led, in all things vital and spiritual, downhill
+all the way. We have gone on frustrating
+natural human intelligences and emotions, inculcating
+false doctrines, and choking with
+incoherent facts the souls which asked to be
+fed with dreams-come-true&mdash;till now our civilisation
+is a thing we cannot look at without a
+mental and moral nausea. We have, in our
+countrysides, peasants too broken for rebellion,
+in our cities.</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+The mortal sickness of a mind<br />
+Too unhappy to be kind.<br />
+</div>
+
+<p>If ever we are to be able to look ourselves and
+each other in the face again it will be because a
+new generation has arisen in whose ears the voice
+of God and His angels has not ceased to sound.
+If only we would see the things that belong to
+our peace, and lead the children instead of
+driving them, who knows what splendid thoughts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+and actions they in their natural development
+might bring to the salvation of the world?</p>
+
+<p>In the Palace of Education which the great
+minds have designed and are designing, many
+stones will be needed&mdash;and so I bring the little
+stone I have hewn out and tried to shape, in
+the hope that it may fit into a corner of that
+great edifice. For if anything is to be done, it
+is necessary that all who have anything to give,
+shall give it. As Francis Bacon said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing can so much conduce to the drawing
+down, as it were, from heaven a whole shower
+of new and profitable Inventions, as this, that
+the experiments of many ... may come to the
+knowledge of one man, or some few, who by
+mutual conference may whet and sharpen one
+another, so that by this ... Arts may flourish, and
+as it were by a commixture and communication
+of Rays, inflame one another.... This sagacity
+by literate experience may in the mean project
+and scatter for the benefit of man many rudiments
+to knowledge which may be had at hand."</p>
+
+<p>And that is why I have left for a little while
+the telling of stories and set myself to write
+down something of what I know about children&mdash;know
+by the grace of memory and by the
+dreams of childhood, to me, thank God, persistent
+and imperishable.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Playthings</div>
+
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">The</span> prime instinct of a child at play&mdash;I do not
+mean a child at games&mdash;is to create. I use the
+word confidently. He will make as well as
+create, if you let him, but always he will create:
+he will use the whole force of dream and fancy
+to create something out of nothing&mdash;over and
+beyond what he will make out of such materials
+as he has to hand. The five-year-old will lay
+a dozen wooden bricks and four cotton reels
+together, set a broken cup on the top of them,
+and tell you it is a steam-engine. And it is.
+He has created the engine which he sees, and
+you don't see, and the pile of bricks and cotton
+reels is the symbol of his creation. He will
+silently borrow your best scissors and cut a
+serrated band of newspaper, which he will
+fasten round his head (with your best brooch,
+if he cannot find a pin), hang another newspaper
+from his shoulders, and sit in state holding the
+hearth-brush. He will tell you that he is a king<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>&mdash;and
+he is. He has created crown, robes,
+sceptre, and kingship. The paper and the rest
+of it are but symbols.</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/gs04.png" width="600" height="497" alt="train" />
+<span class="caption">HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And you shall observe that the toys which
+the child loves best are always those toys which
+lend themselves to such symbolic use.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs05-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs05.jpg" width="600" height="361" alt="tomb" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE TOMB IN THE DESERT.</span><div class='attrib'>18]</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Christmas is at hand. You go to buy gifts
+for the child, in memory of that Other Child
+whose birthday gifts were gold, frankincense,
+and myrrh. You go into the toyshops, elbowing
+your way as best you can, looking for such toys
+as may aid the child in his work of creative
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>You find a vast mass and litter and jumble of
+incredible futilities&mdash;things made to sell, things
+made by people who have forgotten what it is
+like to be a child. Mechanical toys of all sorts,
+stupid toys, toys that will only do one thing,
+and that thing vulgar and foolish. And, worst
+outrage of all, ugly toys, monstrosities, deformities,
+lead devils, grinning humpbacked
+clowns, "comic" dogs and cats, hideous mis-shapen
+pigs, incredible negroes, intolerable golliwogs.
+All such things the natural child, with
+a child's decent detestation of deformity, will
+thrust from it with screams of fear and hatred,
+till the materialistic mother or nurse explains
+that the horror is not really, as the child knows
+it to be, horrible and unnatural, but "funny."
+Thus do we outrage the child's inborn sense of
+beauty, which is also the sense of health and
+fitness, and teach it that deformity is not
+shocking, not pitiable even, but just "funny."
+All these ugly toys are impossible as aids to
+clean imagination.</p>
+
+<p>So, almost in as great, though not in so
+harmful a degree, is the "character doll." The
+old doll was a doll, and not a character. Therefore
+she could assume any character at your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a><br /><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+choice. The character doll is Baby Willy, and
+can never be anything else, unless imagination,
+exasperated and baffled, christens him Silly
+Billy in the moment of furious projection across
+the nursery floor. But the old doll, with her
+good, expressionless face and clear blue eyes,
+could be a duchess or a dairymaid, a captive
+princess or a greengrocer's wife keeping shop,
+a cruel stepmother or Joan of Arc. I beg you
+to try Baby Willy in the character of Joan of Arc.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot hope to understand children by
+common-sense, by reason, by logic, nor by any
+science whatsoever. You cannot understand
+them by imagination&mdash;not even by love itself.
+There is only one way: to remember what
+you thought and felt and liked and hated when
+you yourself were a child. Not what you
+know now&mdash;or think you know&mdash;you ought to
+have thought and liked, but what you did then,
+in stark fact, like and think. There is no other
+way.</p>
+
+<p>Do you remember the toys you liked, the toys
+you played with? Do you remember the toys
+you hated&mdash;after the fading of the first day's
+flush of novelty, of possession? The houses
+with doors that wouldn't open? The stables
+with horses that wouldn't stand up? The
+shops whose goods were part of their painted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+shelves, whose shopmen were as fast glued
+behind the counter as any live shop-assistant
+before the passing of the Shops Act?</p>
+
+<p>And the mechanical toys&mdash;the clockwork
+toys. The engine was all right, even after the
+clockwork ran down for the last time with that
+inexorable whizz which told you all was over;
+you could build tunnels with the big brown
+books in the library and push the engine through
+with your hand&mdash;it would run quite a long way
+out on the other side. But the other clockwork
+things! How can one love and pet a mouse,
+no matter how furry its superficial exterior,
+when underneath, where its soft waistcoat and
+its little feet should be, there is only a hard
+surface from which incompetent wheels protrude?
+And the ostrich who draws a hansom
+cab, and the man who beats the boy with a
+stick? When they have whizzed their last,
+who cares for the tin relics outliving their
+detestable activities?</p>
+
+<p>Think of the toys you liked: the Noah's Ark&mdash;full
+of characters. What stirring dramas of the
+chase, what sporting incidents, what domestic
+and agricultural operations could be carried out
+with that most royal of toys. Mr. Noah, I
+remember, was equally competent and
+convincing as ploughman or carter. But his chief<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+rôle was Sitting Bull. His sons were inimitable
+as Chingachgook and scalp hunters generally.
+You cannot play scalp hunters with the
+mechanical ostrich indissolubly welded to a
+hansom cab.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs06.png" width="500" height="255" alt="another model" />
+<span class="caption">STONEHENGE.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>You loved your bricks, I think, especially if
+you lived in the days when bricks were of well-seasoned
+oak, heavy, firm, exactly proportioned,
+before the boxes of inexact light deal bricks,
+with the one painted glass window, began to
+be made in Germany. How finely those great
+bricks stood for Stonehenge, and how submissively
+Anna, the Dutch doll, whose arms and
+legs were gone, played the part of the Sacrifice.
+If you remember those bricks you will remember
+the polished, white wooden dairy sets in oval
+white boxes&mdash;churns and tubs and kettles and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+pots all neatly and beautifully turned. You
+will remember the doll's house furniture, rosewood,
+duly mitred and dovetailed, fine cabinet-makers'
+work, little beautiful models of beautiful
+things. Now the dolls' house furniture is glued
+together. You can't trust a light-weight china
+doll to sit on the kitchen chairs.... But you
+can get your mechanical ostrich and your
+golliwog....</p>
+
+<p>Children in towns are cut off, at least for most
+of the year, from the splendid and ever-varying
+possibilities of clay and mud and sand, oak-apples
+and snow-berries, acorn-cups and seaweed,
+shells and sticks and stones which serve
+and foster the creative instinct, the thousand
+adjuncts to that play which is dream and reality
+in one.</p>
+
+<p>For them, even more than for the happier
+country children, it is good to choose toys which
+shall possess, above and before all, the one
+supreme quality of a good toy. Let it be a toy
+that is not merely itself, like the ostrich of whom
+I hope you are now as weary as I, but a toy
+that can be, at need, other things. A toy, in
+fine, that your child can, in the fullest and
+most satisfying sense, play with.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Imagination</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">To</span> the child, from the beginning, life is the
+unfolding of one vast mystery; to him our
+stalest commonplaces are great news, our dullest
+facts prismatic wonders. To the baby who has
+never seen a red ball, a red ball is a marvel, new
+and magnificent as ever the golden apples were
+to Hercules.</div>
+
+<p>You show the child many things, all strange,
+all entrancing; it sees, it hears, it touches;
+it learns to co-ordinate sight and touch and
+hearing. You tell it tales of the things it
+cannot see and hear and touch, of men "that
+it may never meet, of lands that it shall never
+see"; strange black and brown and yellow
+people whose dress is not the dress of mother or
+nurse&mdash;strange glowing yellow lands where the
+sun burns like fire, and flowers grow that are
+not like the flowers in the fields at home. You
+tell it that the stars, which look like pin-holes
+in the floor of heaven, are really great lonely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
+worlds, millions of miles away; that the earth,
+which the child can see for itself to be flat, is
+really round; that nuts fall from the trees
+because of the force of gravitation, and not, as
+reason would suggest, merely because there is
+nothing to hold them up. And the child believes;
+it believes all the seeming miracles.</p>
+
+<p>Then you tell it of other things no more
+miraculous and no less; of fairies, and dragons,
+and enchantments, of spells and magic, of flying
+carpets and invisible swords. The child believes
+in these wonders likewise. Why not? If very
+big men live in Patagonia, why should not very
+little men live in flower-bells? If electricity
+can move unseen through the air, why not
+carpets? The child's memory becomes a store-house
+of beautiful and wonderful things which
+are or have been in the visible universe, or in
+that greater universe, the mind of man. Life
+will teach the child, soon enough, to distinguish
+between the two.</p>
+
+<p>But there are those who are not as you and I.
+These say that all the enchanting fairy romances
+are lies, that nothing is real that cannot be
+measured or weighed, seen or heard or handled.
+Such make their idols of stocks and stones, and
+are blind and deaf to the things of the spirit.
+These hard-fingered materialists crush the beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+butterfly wings of imagination, insisting that
+pork and pews and public-houses are more real
+than poetry; that a looking-glass is more real
+than love, a viper than valour. These Gradgrinds
+give to the children the stones which
+they call facts, and deny to the little ones the
+daily bread of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Of the immeasurable value of imagination
+as a means to the development of the loveliest
+virtues, to the uprooting of the ugliest and
+meanest sins, there is here no space to speak.
+But the gain in sheer happiness is more quickly
+set forth. Imagination, duly fostered and
+trained, is to the world of visible wonder and
+beauty what the inner light is to the Japanese
+lantern. It transfigures everything into a glory
+that is only not magic to us because we know
+Who kindled the inner light, Who set up for
+us the splendid lantern of this world.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>But Mr. Gradgrind prefers the lantern unlighted.
+Material facts are good enough for
+him. Until it comes to religion. And then,
+suddenly, the child who has been forbidden to
+believe in Jack the Giant Killer must believe
+in Goliath and David. There are no fairies,
+but you must believe that there are angels.
+The magic sword and the magic buckler are
+nonsense, but the child must not have any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a><br /><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+doubts about the breastplate of righteousness
+and the sword of the Spirit. What spiritual
+reaction do you expect when, after denying all
+the symbolic stories and legends, you suddenly
+confront your poor little Materialist with the
+Most Wonderful Story in the world?</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 699px;">
+<img src="images/gs07.png" width="699" height="478" alt="tree man" />
+<span class="caption">THE TREE LIKE A MAN.</span>
+</div>
+<p>If I had my way, children should be taught
+no facts unless they asked for them. Heaven
+knows they ask questions enough. They should
+just be taught the old wonder-stories, and learn
+their facts through these. Who wants to know
+about pumpkins until he has heard Cinderella?
+Why not tell the miracle of Jonah first, and let
+the child ask about the natural history of the
+whale afterwards, if he cares to hear it?</p>
+
+<p>And one of the greatest helps to a small,
+inexperienced traveller in this sometimes dusty
+way is the likeness of things to each other.
+Your piece of thick bread and butter is a little
+stale, perhaps, and bores you; but, when you
+see that your first three bites have shaped it
+to the likeness of a bear or a beaver, dull teatime
+becomes interesting at once. A cloud that is
+like a face, a tree that is like an old man, a hill
+that is like an elephant's back, if you have things
+like these to look at, and look out for, how short
+the long walk becomes.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 371px;">
+<img src="images/gs08.png" width="371" height="500" alt="doll" />
+<span class="caption">POPPY DOLL.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And in the garden, when the columbine is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+circle of doves, with spread wings and beaks
+that touch, when the foxglove flower is a little
+Puck's hat which will fit on your finger, when
+the snapdragon is not just a snapdragon, but
+a dragon that will snap, and the poppies can
+be made into dolls with black woolly hair and
+grass sashes&mdash;how the enchantment of the
+garden grows. The child will be all the more
+ready to hear about the seed vessels of the
+columbine when he has seen the doves, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+pollen of the poppy will have a double interest
+for her who has played with the woolly-haired
+dolls. Imagination gives to the child a world
+transfigured; let us leave it that radiant
+mystery for the little time that is granted.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs09.png" width="500" height="241" alt="flowers" />
+<span class="caption">DOVES AND DRAGON.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I know a child whose parents are sad because
+she does not love arithmetic and history, but
+rather the beautiful dreams which the Gradgrinds
+call nonsense. Here are the verses I
+wrote for that child:</p>
+
+<div class='center'>FOR DOLLY<br />
+
+<span class='small'>WHO DOES NOT LEARN HER LESSONS</span></div>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+You see the fairies dancing in the fountain,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Laughing, leaping, sparkling with the spray.</span><br />
+You see the gnomes, at work beneath the mountain,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Make gold and silver and diamonds every day.</span><br />
+You see the angels, sliding down the moonbeams,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Bring white dreams, like sheaves of lilies fair.</span><br />
+You see the imps scarce seen against the noonbeams,<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rise from the bonfire's blue and liquid air.</span><br />
+<br />
+All the enchantment, all the magic there is<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hid in trees and blossoms, to you is plain and true.</span><br />
+Dewdrops in lupin leaves are jewels for the fairies;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Every flower that blows is a miracle for you.</span><br />
+Air, earth, water, fire, spread their splendid wares for you.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Millions of magics beseech your little looks;</span><br />
+Every soul your winged soul meets, loves you and cares for you.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Ah! why must we clip those wings and dim those eyes with books?</span><br />
+<br />
+Soon, soon enough, the magic lights grow dimmer,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Marsh mists arise to veil the radiant sky.</span><br />
+Dust of hard highways will veil the starry glimmer;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Tired hands will lay the folded magic by.</span><br />
+Storm winds will blow through those enchanted closes,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fairies be crushed where weed and briar grow strong....</span><br />
+Leave her her crown of magic stars and roses,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leave her her kingdom&mdash;she will not keep it long!</span><br />
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 439px;">
+<img src="images/gs10.png" width="439" height="600" alt="tower" />
+<span class="caption">THE ASTROLOGER&#39;S TOWER.</span>
+</div><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Of Taking Root</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">When</span> the history of our time comes to be
+written, it may be that the historian, remarking
+our many faults and weaknesses, and seeking
+to find a reason for them, speculating on our
+civilisation as we now speculate on the civilisations
+of Rome and Egypt, will come to see that
+the poor blossoms of civic virtue which we put
+forth owe their meagreness and deformity to the
+fact that our lives are no longer permitted to
+take root in material possessions. Material
+possessions indeed we have&mdash;too much of them
+and too many of them&mdash;but they are rather a
+dust that overlays the leaves of life than a
+soil in which the roots of life can grow.</div>
+
+<p>A certain solidness of character, a certain
+quiet force and confidence grow up naturally
+in the man who lives all his life in one house,
+grows all the flowers of his life in one garden.
+To plant a tree and know that if you live and
+tend it, you will gather fruit from it; that if<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+you set out a thorn-hedge, it will be a fine thing
+when your little son has grown to be a man&mdash;these
+are pleasures which none but the very
+rich can now know. (And the rich who might
+enjoy these pleasures prefer to run about the
+country in motor cars.) That is why, for
+ordinary people, the word "neighbour" is
+ceasing to have any meaning. The man who
+occupies the villa partially detached from your
+own is not your neighbour. He only moved in
+a month or so ago, and you yourself will probably
+not be there next year. A house now is
+a thing to live in, not to love; and a neighbour
+a person to criticise, but not to befriend.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 731px;">
+<a href="images/gs11-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs11.jpg" width="731" height="500" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE SILVER TOWERS.</span><div class='attrib'>54]</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>When people's lives were rooted in their
+houses and their gardens they were also rooted
+in their other possessions. And these possessions
+were thoughtfully chosen and carefully
+tended. You bought furniture to live with,
+and for your children to live with after you.
+You became familiar with it&mdash;it was adorned
+with memories, brightened with hopes; it,
+like your house and your garden, assumed then
+a warm friendliness of intimate individuality.
+In those days if you wanted to be smart, you
+bought a new carpet and curtains: now you
+"refurnish the drawing-room." If you have
+to move house, as you often do, it seems cheaper
+to sell most of your furniture and buy other,
+than it is to remove it, especially if the moving
+is caused by a rise of fortune.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>I do not attempt to explain it, but there is
+a certain quality in men who have taken root,
+who have lived with the same furniture, the
+same house, the same friends for many years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a><br /><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+which you shall look for in vain in men who
+have travelled the world over and met hundreds
+of acquaintances. For you do not know a man
+by meeting him at an hotel, any more than you
+know a house by calling at it, or know a garden
+by walking along its paths. The knowledge of
+human nature of the man who has taken root
+may be narrow, but it will be deep. The unrooted
+man who lives in hotels and changes his
+familiars with his houses, will have a shallow
+familiarity with the veneer of acquaintances;
+he will not have learned to weigh and balance
+the inner worth of a friend.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 471px;">
+<img src="images/gs12.png" width="471" height="515" alt="furniture" />
+<span class="caption">FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH.</span>
+</div>
+<p>In the same way I take it that a constant
+succession of new clothes is irritating and unsettling,
+especially to women. It fritters away
+the attention and exacerbates their natural
+frivolity. In other days when clothes were
+expensive, women bought few clothes, but
+those clothes were meant to last, and they did
+last. A silk dress often outlived the natural
+life of its first wearer. The knowledge that the
+question of dress will not be one to be almost
+weekly settled tends to calm the nerves and
+consolidate the character. Clothes are very
+cheap now&mdash;therefore women buy many new
+dresses, and throw the shoddy things away
+when, as they soon do, they grow shabby.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+Men are far more sensible. Every man knows
+the appeal of an old coat. So long as women
+are insensible to the appeal of an old gown,
+they need never hope to be considered, in
+stability of character, the equals of men.</p>
+
+<p>The passion for ornaments&mdash;not ornament&mdash;is
+another of the unsettling factors in an unsettling
+age. The very existence of the "fancy
+shop" is not only a menace to, but an attack
+on the quiet dignity in the home. The hundreds
+of ugly, twisted, bizarre fancy articles which
+replace the old few serious "ornaments" are
+all so many tokens of the spirit of unrest which
+is born of, and in turn bears, our modern
+civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>It is not, alas! presently possible for us as
+a nation to return to that calmer, more dignified
+state when the lives of men were rooted in their
+individual possessions, possessions adorned with
+memories of the past and cherished as legacies
+to the future. But I wish I could persuade
+women to buy good gowns and grow fond of
+them, to buy good chairs and tables, and to
+refrain from the orgy of the fancy shop. So
+much of life, of thought, of energy, of temper
+is taken up with the continual change of dress,
+house, furniture, ornaments, such a constant
+twittering of nerves goes on about all these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+things which do not matter. And the children,
+seeing their mother's gnat-like restlessness,
+themselves, in turn, seek change, not of ideas
+or of adjustments, but of possessions. Consider
+the acres of rubbish specially designed for
+children and spread out over the counters of
+countless toy-shops. Trivial, unsatisfying
+things, the fruit of a perverse and intense commercial
+ingenuity: things made to sell, and
+not to use.</p>
+
+<p>When the child's birthday comes, relations
+send him presents&mdash;give him presents, and his
+nursery is littered with a fresh array of undesirable
+imbecilities&mdash;to make way for which
+the last harvest of the same empty husks is
+thrust aside in the bottom of the toy cupboard.
+And in a couple of days most of the flimsy stuff
+is broken, and the child is weary to death of it
+all. If he has any real toys, he will leave the
+glittering trash for nurse to put away and go
+back to those real toys.</p>
+
+<p>When I was a child in the nursery we had&mdash;there
+were three of us&mdash;a large rocking horse,
+a large doll's house (with a wooden box as
+annexe), a Noah's Ark, dinner and tea things,
+a great chest of oak bricks, and a pestle and
+mortar. I cannot remember any other toys
+that pleased us. Dolls came and went, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+they were not toys, they were characters, and
+now and then something of a clockwork nature
+strayed our way&mdash;to be broken up and disembowelled
+to meet the mechanical needs of
+the moment. I remember a desperate hour
+when I found that the walking doll from Paris
+had clockwork under her crinoline, and could
+not be comfortably taken to bed. I had a
+black-and-white china rabbit who was hard
+enough, in all conscience, but then he never
+pretended to be anything but a china rabbit,
+and I bought him with my own penny at Sandhurst
+Fair. He slept with me for seven or
+eight years, and when he was lost, with my play-box
+and the rest of its loved contents, on the
+journey from France to England, all the dignity
+of my thirteen years could not uphold me in
+that tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>It is a mistake to suppose that children are
+naturally fond of change. They love what
+they know. In strange places they suffer
+violently from home-sickness, even when their
+loved nurse or mother is with them. They
+want to get back to the house they know, the
+toys they know, the books they know. And
+the loves of children for their toys, especially
+the ones they take to bed with them, should be
+scrupulously respected. Children nowadays<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+have insanitary, dusty Teddy Bears. I had a
+"rag doll," but she was stuffed with hair, and
+was washed once a fortnight, after which
+nurse put in her features again with a quill pen,
+and consoled me for any change in her expression
+by explaining that she was "growing up."
+My little son had a soap-stone mouse, and has
+it still.</p>
+
+<p>The fewer toys a child has the more he will
+value them; and it is important that a child
+should value his toys if he is to begin to get out
+of them their <i>full</i> value. If his choice of objects
+be limited, he will use his imagination and
+ingenuity in making the objects available serve
+the purposes of such plays as he has in hand.
+Also it is well to remember that the supplementing
+of a child's own toys by other things, <i>lent
+for a time</i>, has considerable educational value.
+The child will learn quite easily that the difference
+between his and yours is not a difference
+between the attainable and the unattainable,
+but between the constant possession and the
+occasional possession. He will also learn to
+take care of the things which are lent to him,
+and, if he sees that you respect his possessions,
+will respect yours all the more in that some of
+them are, now and then, for a time and in a
+sense, his.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs13-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs13.jpg" width="600" height="384" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE.</span><div class='attrib'>40]</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The generosity of aunts, uncles, and relations
+generally should be kindly but firmly turned
+into useful channels. The purchase of "fancy"
+things should be sternly discouraged.</p>
+
+<p>With the rocking horse, the bricks, the doll's
+house, the cart or wheel-barrow, the tea and
+dinner set, the Noah's Ark and the puzzle maps,
+the nursery will be rudimentarily equipped.
+The supplementary equipment can be added
+as it is needed, not by the sporadic outbursts
+of unclish extravagance, but by well-considered
+and slow degrees, and by means in which the
+child participates. For we must never forget
+that the child loves, both in imagination and
+in fact, to create. All his dreams, his innocent
+pretendings and make-believes, will help his
+nature to unfold, and his hands in their clumsy
+efforts will help the dreams, which in turn will
+help the little hands.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Beauty and Knowledge</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">Clever</span> young people find it amusing to sneer
+at the old-fashioned ideal of combining instruction
+with amusement&mdash;a stupid Victorian ideal,
+we are told, which a progressive generation has
+cast aside. Too hastily, perhaps&mdash;too inconsiderately.
+"Work while you work and play
+while you play" is a motto dealing with a big
+question, and one to which there are at least
+two sides. Entirely to divorce amusement
+and instruction&mdash;may not this tend to make
+the one dull and the other silly? In this, as
+in some other matters, our generation might well
+learn a little from its ancestors. In many ways
+no doubt we have far surpassed the simple
+ideals of our forefathers, but in the matter of
+amusements, in the matter of beauty, in the
+matter of teaching children things without
+boring them, or giving powders really and
+truly concealed in jam&mdash;have we advanced so
+much?</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>To begin with, the world is much uglier than
+it was. At least England is, and France, and
+Belgium, and Italy, and I do not suppose that
+Germany, so far ahead of us with airships, is
+far behind in the ugliness which seems to be,
+with the airship, the hall-mark of a really advanced
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>We are proud, and justly, of the enormous
+advances made in the last sixty years in education,
+sanitation, and all the complicated and
+heavy machinery of the other 'ations, the
+'ologies, and the 'isms; but in these other matters
+how is it with us? We have grown uglier, and
+the things which amuse no longer teach.</p>
+
+<p>For a good many years now&mdash;more than
+three hundred&mdash;old men have said "Such things
+and such were better in our time." And always
+the young have disbelieved the saying, which
+in due course came from their own lips. Has
+it ever occurred to any one that the reason
+why old people say this is quite the simplest of
+all reasons? They say it because it is <i>true</i>,
+and true in our land in quite a special manner.
+The chariot wheels of advancing civilisation
+must always furrow some green fields, grind
+some fair flowers in the dust. But the chariot
+wheels in which civilisation to-day advances
+grows less and less like a chariot and more and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+more like a steam-roller, and unless we steer
+better there will very soon be few flowers left
+to us.</p>
+
+<p>Those of us who have reached middle age
+already see that the old men spoke truly.
+Things are not what they were. Without dealing
+with frauds and adulterations and shoddy
+of all sorts we can see that things are not so
+good as they were, nor yet so beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>And I do not think that this means just that
+we are growing old, and that the fingers of Time
+have rubbed the bloom from the fruit of Life.
+Because those things which must be now as they
+used to be, trees, leaves, rivers, and the laughter
+of little children, flowers, the sea at those points
+where piers are impracticable, and mountains&mdash;the
+ones stony and steep enough to resist the
+jerry-builder and the funicular railway&mdash;still
+hold all, and more than all, their old magic
+and delight.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that it is not only that the ugly and
+unmeaning things have grown, like a filthy
+fungus, over the sheer beauty of the world,
+but that the things that people mean to be
+beautiful are not beautiful, and the things they
+mean to be interesting lack interest.</p>
+
+<p>And the disease is universal: it attacks new
+things as well as old. The cinematographs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+even, newest of the new, as things went in the
+old world; already the canker has eaten them
+up. In the first year of Picture Palaces we all
+crowded to see beautiful pictures of beautiful
+places: Niagara, the Zambesi Falls, the Grand
+Cańon. The comic pieces were perhaps French,
+but they were certainly funny. Also we saw
+the way the world lived, when it was the other
+side of the world: "Elephants a-piling teak,"
+naked savages, or as near naked as don't matter,
+moving in ceremonial dance before the idols that
+were the gods of their deep dangerous faith.
+Dramas of love and death and pity and poverty.
+Quite often in the early days the cinematograph
+tale was of some workman driven by want to
+the theft of a loaf. It is true that the story
+generally ended in his conviction and the
+adoption of his charming baby girl by the wife
+of the <i>Juge d'Instruction</i>, but all the same
+people saw some one poor and sad and tempted,
+and were sorry and sad for his sake. Also we
+had tales of Indians with men that rode amain,
+and horses that one longed to bestride, such
+beauties they were, all fire and delicate strong
+temperament. War dramas too there were,
+where the hero left his sweetheart, and turned
+coward perhaps, redeeming himself with magnificent
+completeness in the splendid <i>débâcle</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+of a forlorn hope. That is all over. Already
+the sordid, heavy hand that smears commercial
+commonplace on all the bright facets of romance
+has obscured the vivid possibilities of the
+cinematograph. We have now for fun the
+elaborate hurting of one American person by
+another American person; for scenery, American
+flat-iron buildings; for romance the incredibly
+unimportant emotions of fleshy American actresses
+and actors. There are two girls, good
+and bad; two men, bad and good. In the end
+the good man gets the good girl, which is, of
+course, as it should be, or would be if we could
+believe in any moral quality in these fat-faced
+impersonators. You don't care a bit who wins,
+but none the less, the four of them mouth and
+mop and mow and make faces at you through
+five interminable acts, and when the good young
+man marries the good young woman in a parlour
+grossly furnished according to American ideals,
+you feel that both of them are well punished
+for their unpardonable existence. All real and
+delicate romance has, we observe, been wiped
+out by the cinematograph.</p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 431px;">
+<a href="images/gs14-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs14.jpg" width="431" height="600" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It has long been the fashion to sneer at the
+Crystal Palace, and indeed the poor dear has
+gone from bad to worse. There are exhibitions
+there all exactly like all other exhibitions:
+Switch-backs, <i>Montagnes Russes</i>, Silhouettes,
+Tumble-scumbles, Weary waves, Threepenny
+thrills (where you hustle against strangers and
+shriek at the impact). But once the Crystal
+Palace was otherwise. In the Victorian days
+we sneer at, when our fathers could not see that
+there was any quarrel between knowledge and
+beauty, both of whom they loved, they built
+the Crystal Palace as a Temple vowed to these
+twin Deities of their worship. Think what the
+Crystal Palace was then. Think what its
+authors intended it to be. Think what, for a
+little time, it was. A place of beauty, a place
+where beauty and knowledge went hand in
+hand. It is quite true that a Brobdingnagian
+Conservatory does not seem so beautiful to us
+as it did to the Prince Consort and Sir Joseph
+Paxton. It is true that even in the palmiest
+days of the Crystal Palace you barked your
+shins over iron girders&mdash;painted a light blue,
+my memory assures me&mdash;and that the boards of
+the flooring were so far apart that you could
+lose, down the cracks of them, not only your
+weekly sixpence or your birthday shilling, but
+even the sudden unexpected cartwheel (do
+they still call a crown that?) contributed by
+an uncle almost more than human. It is true
+that the gravel of the paths in the "grounds"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a><br /><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+tired your feet and tried your temper, and
+that the adventure ended in a clinging to bony
+fingers and admonitions from nurse "not to
+drag so." But on the other hand....</p>
+
+<p>Think of the imagination, the feeling for
+romance that went to the furnishing of the old
+Crystal Palace. There was a lake in the
+grounds of Penge Park. How would our
+twentieth century <i>entrepreneurs</i> deal with a
+lake? We need not pause to invent an answer.
+We know it would be something new and
+nasty. How did these despised mid-Victorians
+deal with it? They set up, amid the rocks
+and reeds and trees of the island in that lake,
+life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world.
+On a great stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his
+vast wings spread for flight. A mammoth sloth
+embraced a tree, and I give you my word that
+when you came on him from behind, you, in
+your six years, could hardly believe that he
+was not real, that he would not presently leave
+the tree and turn his attention to your bloused
+and belted self. (Little boys wore caps with
+peaks then, and blouses with embroidered
+collars.) Convinced, at last, by the cold feel of
+his flank to your fat little hand, that he was
+but stone, you kept, none the less, a memory
+of him that would last your life, and make his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+name, when you met it in a book, as thrilling
+as the name of a friend in the list of birthday
+honours. There was an Ichthyosaurus too,
+and another chap whose name I forget, but he
+had a scalloped crest all down his back to the
+end of his tail. And the Dinosaurus ... he had
+a round hole in his antediluvian stomach: and,
+with a brother&mdash;his own turn to come next,
+as in honour bound&mdash;to give you a leg-up, you
+could explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur
+with feelings hardly to be surpassed by those
+of bandits in a cave. It is almost impossible
+to over-estimate the Dinosaurus as an educational
+influence. On your way back to the
+Palace itself you passed Water Temples surrounded
+by pools where water-lilies grew.
+Afterwards, when you read of tanks and lotuses
+and India, you knew what to think.</p>
+
+<p>There were Sphinxes&mdash;the correct plural was
+told you by aunts, and you rejected it on the
+terrace&mdash;and, within, more smooth water with
+marble at the edge and more lilies, and goldfish,
+palms, and ferns, and humming pervasive music
+from the organ. There were groves or shrubberies;
+you entered them a-tremble with a
+fearful joy. You knew that round the next
+corner or the next would be black and brown
+and yellow men; savages, with their huts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+their wives and their weapons, their looking-glass-pools
+and their reed tunics, so near you
+that it was only a step across a little barrier
+and you could pretend that you also were a
+black, a brown, or a yellow person, and not a
+little English child in a tunic, belt, and peaked
+cap. You never took the step, but none the
+less those savages were your foes and your
+friends, and when you met them in your geography
+you thrilled to the encounter.</p>
+
+<p>Further, there were Courts; I first met
+Venus, the armless wonder of Milo, and Hermes,
+embodied vision of Praxiteles, and the Discobolus,
+whom we all love, and who is exactly
+like Mr. Graham Wallas in youth, in the Grecian
+Court. In the Egyptian Court there were
+pictured pillars, and the very word Egypt is
+to me for their sake a Word of Power to this
+day. And the Spanish Court, the court of the
+Alhambra, the lovely mosaic, the gold and the
+blue and the red, the fountain, the marble, the
+strange unnatural beauty of the horseshoe
+arches....</p>
+
+<p>I shall never see the Alhambra now, but it is
+because of the Spanish Court at the Crystal
+Palace that there will always be an empty ache
+in my thought, an ache of the heart, a longing
+that is not all pain, at its name, a feeling like<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+a beautiful dwarf despair, in that I never shall
+see that blue and red and golden glory, and the
+mystery of its strange mis-shapen arches that
+open to the whole world of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Say of the Mid-Victorians what you will;
+they did at least know, when they set them, the
+seeds of Romance. Think of Euston Station:
+those glorious pillars, the magnificent dream
+of an Egyptian building to loom through the
+Egyptian darkness of London's fogs. And
+the architecture of Egypt was too expensive, and
+Euston remains, a magnificent memorial&mdash;the
+child of genius stunted by finance.</p>
+
+<p>There was Madame Tussaud's too, a close
+link with the French Revolution: the waxen
+heads of kings and democrats, the very guillotine
+itself. And Madame Tussaud's daughter, with
+the breathing breast that seemed alive, and the
+little old woman in the black bonnet, Madame
+herself, who had seen the rise of Republics and
+the deaths of kings. These things, last time I
+trod those halls, were put in the shade, their
+place usurped by vulgar tableaux, explaining
+to the bored spectators what happens to a vulgar
+young man with a wife whose skirt is much too
+short in front and her hair very badly done, if
+he leaves his home for the society of sirens
+and cardsharpers. The tableaux were cheap<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+and nasty, and taught one nothing that one
+could not learn from the <i>Police News</i>.</p>
+<div class="figright" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs15-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs15.jpg" width="600" height="432" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">A CHINESE TEMPLE</span>
+</div>
+<p>Once there were nightingales that sang in
+the gardens on Loampit Hill. Now it is all
+villas. Once the Hilly Fields were hilly fields
+where the children played, and there were
+primroses. Once the road from Eltham to
+Woolwich was a grassy lane with hedges and
+big trees in the hedges, and wild pinks and
+Bethlehem stars, and ragged robin and campion.
+Now the trees are cut down and there are no
+more flowers. It is asphalt all the way, and
+here and there seats divided by iron rods so
+that tired tramps should not sleep on them.
+And the green fields by Mottingham where the
+kingcups used to grow, and the willows by the
+little stream, they are eaten up by yellow
+caterpillars of streets all alike, all horrible;
+while in London old handsome houses are
+tenements, and children play on the dirty
+doorsteps of them with dead mice and mutton
+bones for toys. In the country women wear
+men's tweed caps instead of sunbonnets, and
+Hinde's curlers by day instead of curl papers
+(which if you were pretty, looked like wreaths
+of white roses) by night. And everything is
+getting uglier and uglier. And no one seems
+to care. And only the old people remember<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+that things were not always ugly, remember
+how different things were&mdash;once.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore I would plead with all those who
+have to do with children to resist and to denounce
+uglification wherever they may meet
+with it, and to remember that there is knowledge
+which goes hand in hand with beauty. To show
+a child beautiful things, and to answer as well
+all the questions he will ask about them, to
+charm and thrill his imagination with pictures
+and statues and models of the wonders of the
+world, to familiarise the child with beauty, so
+that he knows ugliness when he meets it, and
+hates it for the outrage it is to the beauty he
+has known and loved ever since he was very
+little&mdash;this is worth doing. If we would make
+beauty the dear rule of a man's life, and ugliness
+the hated exception, we should make beauty as
+familiar to the child as the air he breathes, and
+if we associate knowledge with beauty the child
+will love them both.</p>
+
+
+<hr class='chap' /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Of Building and Other Matters</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">A moment</span> of rapturous anticipation lights life
+when the kind aunt or uncle has given the
+bricks, when the flat, sliding lid has been
+slipped back, and the smooth wooden cubes
+and oblongs have tumbled resoundingly on
+table or floor.</div>
+
+<p>"I am going to build a palace," says the
+child. Or a tower or a church. And, the
+highest hopes inspiring him, he sets out on
+the new adventure. But he does not build a
+palace or a church, or even a railway station.
+What he builds is a factory, or a wall, or, in
+the case of the terra-cotta bricks, a portion of
+a French gentleman's country villa&mdash;the kind
+you see dozens of along the railway between
+Paris and Versailles. And however strong the
+child's desire that what he shall build shall
+be a palace or a church, that is, something
+beautiful and romantic, what he does build
+will always be the last thing he does, or ought<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+to, admire. The fault is in the materials. They
+are lacking both in quality and quantity. No
+box of bricks that can at present be bought for
+money will build anything that can satisfy an
+imaginative child. An ordinary box of bricks&mdash;a
+really handsome one&mdash;measures, say, 12
+by 8 by 2 in. If anything admirable is to
+be built from this amount of material the
+material ought to be presented in very small
+cubes, oblongs and arches&mdash;say 1 in. by ˝ in.
+for the largest bricks, and going down to Ľ by
+Ľ by Ľ in. Given these proportions a really
+pretty though undistinguished building might
+result. But in the box of bricks 12 by 8 by
+2 in. the smallest cube measures ľ in. and the
+largest brick 9 by ľ by ľ in. These long slabs
+of surface cannot be broken and disguised in
+such small buildings as the only ones which
+the materials are enough to build. Hence,
+the deadly monotony of façade, broken only
+by the three or, in the case of the really handsome
+box, five arches, and suggesting nothing
+so much as a "works" or a workhouse.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 550px;">
+<img src="images/gs16.png" width="550" height="549" alt="tower" />
+<span class="caption">THE SQUARE TOWER.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>In the bricks themselves there is not enough
+variety. The stone bricks, it is true, have
+broken out into a variety of ugly shapes and a
+blue colour with which you can, if you like,
+build a Mansard roof. But a Mansard roof in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+a coarse ugly blue tint, is no thing of beauty.
+Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support
+it, and if you make your building solid, every
+brick in your box will be used up, and all you
+will have to show for it will be a partially built
+wing of a peculiarly undesirable villa residence,
+replete with every modern inconvenience. Nor
+must it be supposed that the difficulty can be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+met by adding more and more boxes of bricks.
+Add them, by all means; and the result will
+be a larger and probably an uglier factory,
+or a completed, and therefore more completely
+hideous, villa. Unless you are a millionaire,
+and have a toy cupboard as big as a pantechnicon,
+you will never have enough bricks to
+build up the solid masses which rest the eye,
+and give solidity and dignity to architecture.
+Among such solid masses <i>steps</i> are not the least
+important. Every child knows that a really
+good flight of steps will take half the bricks in
+his box and leave insufficient material for the
+edifice to which the steps were intended to lead
+up. The tall broad smooth wall, its quiet surface
+disturbed only by one or two windows, a
+flight of steps and a doorway, is for ever out of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+reach of the child who has only bricks wherewith
+to build.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs17.png" width="500" height="268" alt="arches" />
+<span class="caption">SHELL ARCHES</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The arches supplied with boxes of bricks are
+usually few and badly proportioned. There is
+seldom any provision for setting them up in
+a colonnade.</p>
+
+<p>The pillars which will support the ends of
+two arches are too wide for the <i>end</i> arch, which
+is single. This difficulty is dealt with in stone
+bricks, but not in wooden ones; at any rate
+so far as my experience goes.</p>
+
+<p>There never was a time, one supposes, when
+so much money was spent on children and
+their toys. It is impossible to believe that,
+should some toy maker design and put on the
+market really desirable bricks for children,
+there would not be a ready sale for them. I
+suggest, then, that bricks are too large, and too
+small&mdash;and that what is needed is much smaller
+bricks, and much larger ones. The bricks in
+the old chest in our nursery started with 2-in.
+cubes, and went on in gradations of 2-in. to the
+largest brick&mdash;12 by 2 by 2 in. The chest
+itself must have been at least 4 by 2 by 1˝ ft.
+Another detestable quality in our modern
+bricks is their inexactness&mdash;a sixteenth or
+even a quarter of an inch, more or less, is no
+more to the maker of bricks nowadays than it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+is to a bad dressmaker. Our bricks were well
+and truly cut: they were of seasoned oak,
+smooth and pleasant to touch&mdash;none of the
+rough-sawn edges which vex the hand and
+render the building unstable; they were heavy&mdash;a
+very important quality in bricks. They
+"stayed put." I suggest that such bricks as
+these, supplemented by arches of varied curves,
+but unvarying thicknesses, and slabs of board
+varying in breadth but not in length, would
+not be a toy beyond the purse of kind uncles
+and aunts, and certainly not beyond the means
+of our Council schools. The slabs of boards
+are to build steps with and to make roofs with.
+Every child who has ever built with bricks feels
+the reckless wastefulness of using for steps the
+bricks so much needed for walls and towers.
+And who has not experienced the aggravation
+of finding when his tower is built that he has
+used up all the long bricks near its foundation
+and has now none left which are long enough
+to lay across its summit and form its roof?
+The slabs of board should be, like the bricks, of
+seasoned oak, and should be an inch thick.
+There should be plenty of arches&mdash;so as to
+render possible some sort of resemblance to
+Norman and classical architecture.</p>
+
+<p>But bricks alone, however beautiful and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+varied, cannot as building material have the
+value which material freely chosen would have.
+Children love to make mud pies, and to build
+sand castles, because the material is plastic
+and responds with more or less of docility to
+their demands upon it. Also there is always
+enough of it, which there never is of bricks, or
+for the matter of that, of plasticine. I can
+imagine a splendid happiness for a child in
+a bushel of plasticine&mdash;but the sticks of plasticine
+are too small to be made into anything
+architecturally satisfying; and much too expensive
+for ordinary children to have in any
+but such quantities as encourage niggling.
+You will notice that children never tire of
+building sand castles on the sea-shore&mdash;but
+they would soon tire of building with a quart
+of damp sand on a table. It is true that the
+sea washes away your sand castle, usually
+before it is finished, but its end is finely catastrophic
+and full of damp delightful incident.
+Also the climax has the great essential of drama&mdash;it
+is inevitable. How different the demolition
+of the brick-built house by mamma, who wants
+space for cutting out, or by Mary, who desires
+to lay the table. The most promising of
+palaces, the most beautiful of bridges, are,
+at the urgence of these grown-up needs, swept<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+away, and so, never being able to finish anything,
+the builder becomes discouraged. Perhaps
+he takes to the floor as an eligible building
+site, only to find his buildings exposed to the
+tempestuous petticoat of Mary, or the carelessly
+stepping high-heeled shoes of mamma. The same
+thing happens with a dolls' school, or a dolls'
+dinner-party, or any game requiring pageantry
+of any sort&mdash;so that little girls who would like
+their dolls to be actors in some scene of magnificence
+find no safe place for the actors save
+in their arms&mdash;and nurse with enforced premature
+maternal fussings the doll who, in happier
+circumstances, might be a Druid or a martyr,
+or Francis the First at the Field of the Cloth of
+Gold. It is better to the child's mind that the
+cherished doll should safely be baby for ever,
+than that it should be Francis the First and get
+walked on.</p>
+
+<p>In any house where space makes such a thing
+possible, a table might be set aside for children,
+to be their very own&mdash;a table on which neither
+food nor millinery should ever trespass. Of
+course it is needful that toys and pseudo-toys
+should be "put away" daily, but it is not
+necessary that they should all be put away.
+Those which are being used in some splendid
+half-developed scheme might surely be allowed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+to stay where they are, so that it may be possible
+to go on with the game next day. A truce might
+be called of that ruthless tidying up which, every
+day, destroys the new idea, and compels the
+child each day to produce a new scheme instead
+of allowing it to work on yesterday's and bring
+it to something a little nearer the perfection
+which it touched when the child's mind first
+conceived it. But, it may be urged, children
+leave everything half-finished, and go off to
+something else. Of course they do&mdash;but clear
+away the half-finished thing, and you will find
+when they come back from the butterfly flight
+after some other interest, that they will not be
+pleased with you.</p>
+
+<p>"I've put all your bricks nicely away," you
+say proudly; and Tommy will say "Bother!"
+in his heart, even if his lips are sufficiently
+trained to avoid that expletive and to substitute:
+"I do wish you hadn't: I wanted to
+finish building my tower."</p>
+
+<p>You see one thing leads to another. It isn't
+that children are any more bird-witted than
+we are: it is that they have not yet learned
+to restrain the thousand curiosities, desires, and
+creative impulses proper to their age. You,
+of course, if you desired to set up a tableau of
+the Field of the Cloth of Gold, would sit down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+with a bit of pencil and the back of an envelope
+and jot down all the properties required for
+staging the scene. But the child who has
+"had" the Field "in History," and whose
+imagination has been stirred by the name of
+it&mdash;a thing that will happen under the stupidest
+of teachers&mdash;sets up Henry and Francis in paper
+crowns and only then begins to see that tents
+and banners and cloth of gold are lacking.
+Perhaps he goes off to the village shop to get
+flags, perhaps to your handkerchief case for
+tent-cloth, perhaps to the meadow beyond the
+orchard to gather buttercups. While on any
+of these quests some supremely important
+event may strike across his plans, and overshadow
+them&mdash;a new kitten, a gift from the
+gardener of plants for his little garden, or
+the fact that some one is going fishing. Then
+Francis and Henry are forgotten, the buttercups
+left dying on the doorstep, and the
+tent-cloth crammed into the pockets among
+string, stamps, acid drops, and pieces of the
+watch he took to pieces last holidays and never
+put together again, and he will follow the new
+trail. But he will come back to the Field of
+the Cloth of Gold, and if you have "tidied up"
+the kings and put their crowns in the wastepaper
+basket the child will be disappointed
+and worried, his imagination checked and his
+scheme baffled.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 345px;">
+<img src="images/gs18.png" width="345" height="550" alt="tents" />
+<span class="caption">HANDKERCHIEF TENTS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>His annexation of your handkerchiefs will
+not occur if you have accustomed him to come
+to you or to his nurse for the means to his small
+ends; but if there is no one to whom he can
+apply for help, you will find that he will not
+stick at the sacred threshold of your handkerchief
+case. The tents of the Field of the Cloth
+of Gold will be far more important to him than
+the inviolability of that scented treasure-house&mdash;unless,
+of course, you happen to have explained
+to him exactly how much you dislike that your
+handkerchiefs should keep the sort of company
+they meet with in his pockets. Then, if he
+loves you, and has found you reasonable, he
+will refrain, while wondering at your prejudices.
+But he will&mdash;or ought to&mdash;find some other
+material for tents&mdash;letter paper perhaps. Letter
+paper makes quite good tents, though not nearly
+so good, of course, as handkerchiefs folded
+diagonally&mdash;supported by a central pole, say
+a penholder, and fastened down at the tucked-in
+corners with pins or rose thorns. You can
+explain to him that rose-thorns hurt handkerchiefs,
+but you will not punish him if this
+has not occurred to him. And this brings one
+to the question of crime and punishment, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a><br /><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+which perhaps I had better say what I have to
+say before I go on talking about bricks and
+how to supplement them. As I was saying,
+one thing leads to another.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>The Moral Code</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">In</span> attempting to explain and enforce a moral
+code, the first and most essential need is to
+formulate definitely to oneself the code which
+one proposes to enforce and to explain. There
+is nothing from which children, and subject
+human beings generally, suffer so much as the
+incoherence of the thought of those in authority
+over them. Before you can begin to lay down
+the law you must know what that law is, and
+your heart, soul, and spirit must not only know
+it, but approve it, before you can gain a willing
+obedience to it from those on whom you wish
+to impose it. By this I do not mean only that
+we ought to make up our minds whether this,
+that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong,
+as it occurs, but that we ought to have a clear
+perception and knowledge of the things that
+are right and the things that are wrong, and
+have a standard which we can apply to any
+new action brought under our notice, so that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+measuring the new act by our old standard, we
+shall be able to say, with some sort of rough
+accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is right."</div>
+
+<p>And the standard of expediency is not a good
+one for this purpose, nor is the standard of
+custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or
+the standard of success in life. Children are
+not good judges of expediency. The law of
+mere custom will not be strong enough to bind
+them when desire calls with enchanting voice
+to forbidden things. Gentility and the gospel
+of getting on will leave them cold. You may
+at first deal merely with a succession of unrelated
+particulars, saying, "This is right," "This
+is wrong," beating down the children's questionings
+by your mere <i>Ipse dixit;</i> but a time will
+come when it will not be enough, in answer to
+their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?"
+to answer "Because I say so." The child will
+want some other standard which he himself
+can apply. The standard of what you say may
+be a shifting one, and anyhow, he cannot be
+at all sure what you will say unless he knows
+what is your standard, the standard by which
+you will decide whether to say, in any given
+case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in
+order that you may clearly set before the child
+your own moral standard you must first have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+set it very clearly before yourself. It is not
+enough to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying
+is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If you
+feel that these things are wrong because they
+are contrary to the will of God, you will not
+find that that explanation is sufficient for a
+child unless he knows very much more about
+God than His name and certain miraculous
+and incomprehensible attributes of His. He
+will want to know what is the will of God, to
+which these wrong things are contrary. And
+he will want very much to know the definite
+right as well as the definite wrong. You will
+have to give the child a standard that can be
+applied to positives as well as negatives.</p>
+
+<p>There is a very simple standard by which to
+measure the actions of children&mdash;and, much more
+severely, our own actions. It is set up in the
+words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would
+they should do unto you"&mdash;a standard so simple
+that quite little children can understand and
+apply it, a standard so severe that were it
+understood and applied by us who are no longer
+children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we
+call civilisation could not endure for a day.
+There is no other standard by which a child
+can judge its own actions, and yours, and
+judge them justly.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Having fixed your standard it will be necessary
+to try your own actions by it as well as the
+child's. And this standard will give you the
+only vital code of morality, because it compels
+the continual exercise of imagination, the
+continual preening and flight of the wings of
+the soul. You cannot order your life by that
+Divine precept without a hundred times a day
+asking yourself, "How should <i>I</i> like that, if
+I were not myself?" without continually
+putting yourself, imaginatively, in some one
+else's place. And when the child asks, "Why
+is it wrong to steal?" you can lead him to see
+how little he would like to have his own possessions
+stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong
+to lie?" you may teach him to imagine his
+own bitterness if others should deceive him.
+It is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong
+because I say so," or even "because God says
+so"; but if you want to mark it right or
+wrong, to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on
+the tables of the heart and the soul, teach the
+child to see for himself <i>how</i> things are right
+and wrong&mdash;and to judge of them by that
+one Divine and unfailing rule.</p>
+
+<p>Of course even when the child knows what
+is right he will not always do it, any more than
+you do: and one of the questions to be considered<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+is how you shall deal with those lapses
+from moral rectitude of which he, no less than
+you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the
+old savage punishments, were revenge, and
+nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay out"
+the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth
+for a tooth. More humane and reasonable
+legislators have sought to prove that punishment
+is curative&mdash;that the fear of punishment
+will deter people from doing wrong. A distinguished
+official of the Home Office gave it
+as his opinion only the other day that punishment,
+no matter how severe, will not act as a
+deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of
+the criminal's escaping it. What would deter
+would be the <i>certainty</i> of punishment, however
+slight. Now since you are not omniscient you
+cannot pretend to your child that if he does
+wrong you are certain to know and to punish
+him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he
+will find you out immediately, and estimate
+your lie at its true blackness. You can, however,
+without any pretence, assure him that
+if he does wrong he himself will know it, that
+it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and
+miserable till he is able to wash himself in the
+waters of repentance and forgiveness. That
+if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly
+he will feel clean and brave. And he will find
+that what you say is true. But not unless you
+shall have succeeded in convincing him that
+your standard is a true standard, and that the
+things which that standard shows to be wrong
+are wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of
+the imagination: to teach the child so to put
+himself in the place of the one he has wronged
+that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its
+own punishment.</p>
+
+<p>No one desires, of course, that a child should
+be always feeling his own moral pulse: if he
+has learned that there is a right and a wrong
+way he will not be always bothering about which
+way he may be living&mdash;it will be only when
+something goes amiss that he will stop and
+consider. Just as one does not stop to think
+whether one is breathing properly, only when
+one chokes one knows that one isn't.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs19-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs19.jpg" width="600" height="360" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">ONE HALF OF THE CITY.</span></div>
+
+<p>Punishment, however, should not be confused
+with the consequences of action, and
+while children are yet too small to understand
+all that God may be to them, it is possible to
+show them the <i>consequences</i> of their misdeeds,
+magnifying these beyond the consequences of
+the act to be reprobated and thus pointing the
+general moral. I mean that one may honourably
+apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood,
+the <i>sort</i> of consequences&mdash;proportioned,
+of course, to the wrong-doing&mdash;which would
+result from such wrong-doing on a larger scale
+by a grown-up person. It will be exceedingly
+troublesome and painful for you, but perhaps
+its painfulness to you may be the measure of
+its value to the child. For instance, Tommy
+steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies
+is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is
+very little, and your impulse, if not to slap him,
+might be to tell him that he is a very naughty
+boy and have done with it. It will go to your
+heart to bring home to him the consequences
+of theft, especially as you cannot do it at once;
+but if, next time you are about to send him to
+the shop for something, you say, "No: I can't
+send you because you might steal my pennies
+as you did the other day"&mdash;this will be hateful
+for you to do&mdash;but it will show him more plainly
+than anything else what happens to people who
+steal. They are not trusted. And the same
+with lies. Show him that those who tell lies
+are not believed.</p>
+
+<p>But, remembering how it felt to be a child,
+have pity, and do not teach him these lessons
+when any one else is there. Let the humiliation
+of them be a secret between you two alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a><br /><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+Only when a wrong has been done which
+demands a restitution or an amend should the
+soul of the child, shamed with wrong-doing, be
+exposed to alien eyes.</p>
+
+<p>When we sit in judgment on the aggressions
+and on the shortcomings of others the first
+need is neither justice nor mercy, but imagination
+with self-knowledge. The judge should
+be able to put himself in the place of the accused,
+to perceive, by sympathetic vision, the
+point of view of the one who stands before the
+judgment-seat. The judge is an adult human
+being, and therefore has some knowledge of the
+mental and moral processes of human beings.
+He should use this knowledge; and when it
+comes to a grown-up judging a child, it is no
+less necessary for the judge to place himself
+imaginatively in the place of the small offender.
+And this cannot be done by imagination and
+self-consideration alone. Memory is needed.
+Let me say it again: there is only one way
+of understanding children; they cannot be
+understood by imagination, by observation,
+nor even by love. They can only be understood
+by memory. Only by remembering how
+you felt and thought when you yourself were
+a child can you arrive at any understanding of
+the thoughts and feelings of children. When<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+you were a child you suffered intensely from
+injustice, from want of understanding, in your
+grown-up censors. You were punished when
+you had not meant to do wrong: you escaped
+punishment when you had not meant to do
+right. The whole scheme of grown-up law
+seemed to you, and very likely was, arbitrary
+and incomprehensible. And you suffered from
+it desperately. So much that, even if you have
+now forgotten all that you suffered, the mark
+of that suffering none the less remains on your
+soul to this day.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that the humiliations, the
+mortifications endured in childhood leave an
+ineffaceable brand on the spirit. How then
+can we not remember, and, remembering, refrain
+from hurting other children as we were
+hurt?</p>
+
+<p>The spirit of the child is sensitive to the
+slightest change in the atmosphere about him.
+You can convey disapproval quite easily&mdash;and
+approval also. But while most parents and
+guardians are constantly alive to the necessity
+for expressing disapproval and inflicting punishment,
+the other side of the medal seems to be
+hidden from them.</p>
+
+<p>The most prevalent idea of training children
+is the idea of prohibition and punishment.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+"You are not to do it! You will? Then take
+that!" the blow or punishment following,
+expresses simply and exactly the whole theory
+of moral education held by the mass of modern
+mothers. The vast mistake, both in the education
+of children and government of nations, is
+the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues.
+Also the fact that punishment follows on the
+failure <i>not</i> to do certain things&mdash;whereas no
+commensurate reward is offered even for success
+in <i>not</i> doing, let alone for success in active and
+honourable well-doing. The reward of negative
+virtue is negative also, and consists simply in
+non-punishment. The rewards of active virtue
+are, in the world of men, money and praise.
+But there are deeds for which money cannot
+pay, and sometimes these are rewarded by
+medals and paragraphs in the newspapers&mdash;not
+at all the same thing as being rewarded by the
+praise of your fellow-men. Now children, like
+all sane human beings, love praise. They love it
+more keenly perhaps than other human beings
+because their natural craving for it has not
+been overlaid with false modesties and shames.
+They have not learned that</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+Praise to the face<br />
+Is open disgrace.<br />
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'>On the contrary, praise to the face seems to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+them natural, right, and altogether desirable.
+See that they get it.</div>
+
+<p>Do you remember when you were little how
+you struggled to exercise some tiresome negative
+virtue, such as not biting your nails, not teasing
+the cat, not executing, with your school-boots,
+that heavy shuffling movement, so simply
+relieving to you, so mysteriously annoying to
+the grown-ups? Can you have forgotten how
+for ages and ages&mdash;three or four days, even&mdash;you
+refrained from drinking water with your
+mouth full of food, from leaving your handkerchief
+about in obvious spots natural and convenient,
+how you sternly denied yourself the
+pleasure of drawing your hoop stick along the
+front railings&mdash;because, though you enjoyed
+this musical exercise, others did not? And
+how, all through the interminable period of
+self-denial, you heartened yourself to these
+dismal refrainings by the warm comfortable
+thought, "<i>Won't</i> they be pleased?"&mdash;and
+how they never were. They took it all as a
+matter of course. To them, because they had
+forgotten how it felt to be a child, all your
+heroic sacrifices and renunciations counted as
+nothing. To them it was natural that a child
+should keep his fingers out of his mouth, and
+off the tail of Puss, should keep his feet still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+and his handkerchief in his pocket, should do
+the suitable things with meat, drink, and hoop-sticks.
+They never noticed, and so they never
+praised. But when, worn out by long abstinence
+from natural joys, natural relaxations, you
+broke one of those rules which seemed to you
+so useless and so arbitrary, then they noticed
+fast enough.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs20.png" width="500" height="233" alt="poor cat" />
+<span class="caption">THE TAIL OF PUSS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Can you <i>never</i> remember," they said, "just
+a simple thing like not biting your nails?"
+Bitter aloes following, no doubt. Or, "I really
+should have thought," they would say, "that
+considering the number of times I've spoken
+about it you would remember not to make that
+frightful noise," with boots or hoop sticks or
+a blade of wet grass or what not. They did
+not pause to think, in their earnest grown-up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+business of "bringing the boy up," how many,
+how very many, and how seemingly silly, were
+the "don'ts" which you had to remember.
+But you will not be like that: you will notice
+and approve, and most needful of all, reward
+with praise the earnest, difficult refrainings of
+the child who is trying to please you: who is
+trying to learn the long table of your commandments
+all beginning with "Thou shalt
+not," and to practise them, not because these
+commandments appeal to him as reasonable or
+just or useful, but just because he loves you,
+wants to please you, and, deepest need of love,
+wants you to be pleased with him.</p>
+
+<p>A hasty yet determined effort at putting
+yourself in his place is the thing needed every
+time you have to sit in judgment on the actions
+of another human being&mdash;most of all when that
+human being is a little child. If we cultivated
+this habit we should not hurt other people as
+we do. I have seen cruel things.</p>
+
+<p>A little girl, suffering from a slight affection
+of the eye, was given by a sympathetic aunt
+the run of a box of that aunt's old ball-dresses.
+She spent a whole hour in arranging a costume
+which seemed to her to be of royal beauty.
+A crushed pink tulle dress, a many-coloured
+striped Roman sash, white satin slippers, put on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+over the black strapped shoes, and turning up
+very much at the toes. White gloves, very
+dirty and wrinkled like a tortoise's legs over the
+plump dimpled arms. Hair dressed high on the
+head over a pad of folded stockings, secured by
+hairpins borrowed from the housemaid. A
+wreath, of crushed red calico roses from somebody's
+last summer's hat, some pearl beads,
+the property of cook, and a blue heart out of a
+cracker&mdash;saved since Christmas.</p>
+
+<p>"I am a beautiful Princess," said the child,
+and the housemaid responded heartily: "That
+you are, ducky, and no mistake. Go and show
+mother."</p>
+
+<p>But mother, when she was told that this
+stumbling, long-tailed bundle of crushed finery
+was a beautiful Princess, laughed and said,
+"Princess Rag-Bag, I should say."</p>
+
+<p>"It's only pretending, you know," the child
+explained, wondering why explanations should
+be needed by mother and not by Eliza.</p>
+
+<p>The mother laughed again. "I shouldn't
+pretend to be a Princess with that great stye
+in my eye," she said, and thought no more
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>But the child remembers to this day how
+she slunk away and tore off the beautiful
+Princess-clothes, and cried and cried and cried,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+and wished that she was dead. Children really
+do wish that, sometimes.</p>
+
+<p>Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness.
+A child spends hours in preparing some surprise
+for you&mdash;decorates your room with flowers, not
+in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe
+before your impatiently awaited arrival&mdash;or
+ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters
+to represent flags at your home-coming.</p>
+
+<p>"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly,
+hardly looking&mdash;and the child sees that you
+hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's
+a dear!"</p>
+
+<p>The child clears it all away, and with the
+dying flowers something else is cleared away,
+something that will no more live again than will
+the faded flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Be generous of praise&mdash;it is the dew that
+waters the budding flowers of kindness and
+love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best
+in the child the true Elixir of Life.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Praise and Punishment</div>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs21-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs21.jpg" width="600" height="409" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">While</span> admitting that no pains can be too
+great, no labours too arduous to spend upon the
+education of the child, we must not shut our
+eyes to the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up
+may often be better for him&mdash;or much more
+often her&mdash;than it is for the child for whom
+that sacrifice is made. There is a certain
+danger that the enthusiastic educator, passionately
+desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may
+incidentally, and quite without meaning it,
+sacrifice something very vital in the child.
+For the child whose every want is anticipated,
+whose every thought is considered, who is
+surrounded by the softness of love and the
+sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint
+and dismay the fond parent or guardian,
+pastor or master, by growing up selfish,
+cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with
+no capacity for obedience, no power of endurance,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+no hardihood, no resource&mdash;whining
+in adversity and intolerable in success. The
+object of education is to fit the child for the
+life of the man. Once it was held that a
+rigorous discipline, enforced by violence, was
+the best preparation for the life which is never
+too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all
+that, and there is some danger that the pendulum
+may swing too far, and that the aim of
+education may come to mean only the ensuring
+of a happy childhood, without arming the
+child for the battle of life. It is right that
+to the educator the child should be the prime
+object, the centre of the universe, the prime
+consideration to which every other consideration
+must give way. But there is the
+danger that the child may become his own
+prime object, not only the centre of his own
+universe, but its circumference, and cherish,
+deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the conviction
+that all other considerations should and will
+give way to his desires.</div>
+
+<p>Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough,
+hard school, that he is only the centre of his
+own universe in that sense in which the same
+is true of us all&mdash;that far from being the prime
+object of the world which surrounds him, he
+himself counts for little or nothing, except to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+those who love him&mdash;and that the consideration
+he receives will not be, as was the consideration
+lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging,
+and invariable, but will be conditioned
+by the services he renders to others and the
+extent to which he can be to them pleasant or
+useful. Life, it is true, will teach him all this,
+but if her teaching be a course of lessons in a
+wholly new subject, they will be very difficult
+to learn, and the learning will hurt. Whereas
+if, from the very beginning, the child is taught
+to understand the interdependence of human
+beings, the fact that rights involve duties and
+that duties confer rights, he will be able to
+apply and to use for his own help the
+lessons which later life will teach him. More,
+he will have at the outset of life the advantage
+which one with a clear conception of rights
+and duties has over one who only sees life as a
+muddle and maze of things that are "jolly
+hard lines." They suffer as without hope who
+see that the world needs mending, and have
+never made up their minds what sort of world
+they would like. Whereas the child to whom,
+quite early, the lesson of human solidarity has
+been taught will, when he shall be a man,
+know very well what he wants, and will be able,
+however humbly, to help, in his day and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+generation, to re-mould the world to the fashion
+of his desire.</p>
+
+<p>It is not difficult to teach children the duties
+of kindness and helpfulness to others, and
+the duty of public spirit and loyalty to their
+fellow-men. A healthy child is active, energetic,
+and deeply desirous of using his senses and his
+faculties. It is possible to assign to quite a
+small child certain duties, but the wise educator
+will manage to make such duties privileges and
+not tasks. The system of sentencing children
+to the performance of useful offices by way of
+punishment is abominable. It gives them for
+ever a distaste for that particular form of social
+service.</p>
+
+<p>If we must punish, let us not permit the
+punishments to trench on the province of useful
+and, in good conditions, pleasant tasks. Give
+the boy an imposition rather than an order to
+weed the shrubbery walk; set the girl to learn
+a French verb rather than to hem dusters.
+The consciousness of being useful is very dear
+to children&mdash;it is worth while to feel and to
+show gratitude to them for all services rendered,
+and though it may be, as they say, more trouble
+than it is worth to teach the children to help
+effectually, that only means that it is more
+trouble than the help they give is worth. What<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+is really valuable is the cultivation of the sense
+that it is a good and pleasant thing to help
+mother to wash up, to help father to water the
+geraniums, and, further, a thing which will
+make father and mother pleased and grateful.
+Children, like the rest of us, love to feel themselves
+important. Is it not well that they should
+feel themselves important as givers, and not
+as claimants only?</p>
+
+<p>The tale of their public obligations may well
+begin with the lesson that it is part of the duty
+of a citizen to help to keep his city, his country,
+clean and beautiful. Therefore, we must not
+leave nasty traces of our presence in street or
+meadow&mdash;such traces as orange-peel, banana-skins,
+and the greasy bag that once held the
+bun or the bull's-eye. And it is quite as important
+to learn what we should as what we
+should not do. The idea and organisation of the
+Boy Scouts is a fine object-lesson in the way of
+training children to be good citizens. The
+duties of a citizen should be taught in all schools:
+they are more important than the latitude of
+Cathay and the industries of Kamskatka. Even
+the smallest children could learn something of
+this branch of education. I should like to
+write a little book of Moral Songs for Young
+Citizens, only I wouldn't call it that. The songs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+in it might take the place of "Mary had a little
+lamb" or whatever it is that they make the
+infants learn by heart. One of them might go
+something like this:</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+I must not steal, and I must learn<br />
+Nothing is mine that I do not earn.<br />
+I must try in work and play<br />
+To make things beautiful every day.<br />
+I must be kind to every one<br />
+And never let cruel things be done.<br />
+I must be brave, and I must try<br />
+When I am hurt never to cry,<br />
+And always laugh as much as I can<br />
+And be glad that I'm going to be a man,<br />
+To work for my living and help the rest,<br />
+And never do less than my very best.<br />
+</div>
+
+<div class='poem'>Another might begin:</div>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+I must not litter the park or the street<br />
+With bits of paper or things to eat:<br />
+I must not pick the public flowers<br />
+They are not <i>mine</i>, but they are <i>ours</i>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br />
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'>And so on. Simple rhymes learned when you
+are very young stay with you all your life. The
+duties and refrainings just touched on here
+might be elaborated in different poems. There
+might be one on being brave, and another on
+prompt obedience to the word of command.
+There is no position in life where the habit of
+obedience to your superior officer is not of value.
+To teach obedience without bullying would be
+quite easy: with very little children it could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+take the form of a game, in which a series of
+orders were given&mdash;for the performance of such
+actions as occur in the mulberry bush; and the
+competition among the children to be the first
+to obey the new order would quicken the child's
+mind and body, while the habit of obedience to
+the word of command would be firmly planted,
+so that it would grow with the child's growth
+and adapt itself to the needs of life. I would
+write more than one poem, I think, about the
+green country and the shame it is that those
+who should love and protect it desecrate it as
+they do. Let it be the pride of the child that
+he is not of the sort of people who leave greasy
+papers lying about in woods, broken bottles in
+meadows, and old sardine tins among the
+rushes at the margin of cool streams. Such
+people touch no foot of land that they do not
+desecrate and defile. Wherever they are
+suffered to be, there they leave behind them
+the vilest leavings. Filthy papers, the rinds
+and skins of fruit, crusts and parings, jagged
+tins, smashed bottles, straw and shavings and
+empty stained cardboard boxes. They leave
+it all, openly and shamelessly, making the
+magic meadows sordid as a suburb, and carrying
+into the very heart of the country the vulgarities
+of the street corner. It is time, indeed, that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
+certain of the finer duties of citizenship were
+taught in all schools, Harrow as well as Houndsditch,
+Eton as well as Borstal. And one of
+the first of these is the keeping of the beauty of
+beautiful places unsmirched, the duty of preserving
+for others the beauty which we ourselves
+admire, the duty of burning bits of paper
+and burying pieces of orange-peel. If there is
+not time to teach geography as well as the
+duties and decencies of a citizen, the geography
+should go, and the duties and decencies be
+taught. For what is the use of knowing the
+names of places if you do not know that places
+should be beautiful, and what is the use of
+knowing how many counties there are in England
+unless you know also that every field and
+every tree and every stream in every one of
+those counties is a precious gift of God not to be
+desecrated by shameless refuse and garbage,
+but to be cared for as one cares for one's garden,
+and loved, as one should love every inch of
+our England, this garden-land more beautiful
+than any garden in the world?</div>
+
+<p>A child should be taught to read almost as
+soon as it has learned to speak. I can remember
+my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a
+time when I could not read. Without going
+into details as to the merits of different methods<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+of teaching, I may say that a good many words
+may be taught before it is necessary to teach
+the letters&mdash;that reading should precede spelling&mdash;that
+CAT should be presented whole, as the
+symbol of Cat&mdash;and that the dissection of it into
+C.A.T. should come later. I believe that children
+taught in this way, and taught young, will not
+in after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling.
+They will spell naturally, as they speak
+or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of
+reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians,
+it would be impossible to speak too highly.
+It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet.
+The value to the child himself is not less. Nor
+is it only that the matter of his reading stores
+his mind with new material. To him also it
+is a good thing that he should sometimes be
+still and quiet, and at the same time interested
+and occupied. Of books for little children
+there are plenty&mdash;not fine literature, it is true&mdash;but
+harmless. As the child grows older he will
+want more books, and different books&mdash;and if
+you insist on personally conducting him on his
+grand tour through literature he will probably
+miss a good many places that he would like to
+go to. For a child from ten onwards it is no
+bad thing to give the run of a good general
+library. When he has exhausted the story<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+books he will read the ballads, the histories
+and the travels, and may even nibble at science,
+poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of
+thirteen, browsed contentedly in such a library&mdash;where
+Percy's anecdotes in thirty-nine volumes
+or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke
+and Berkeley. I even read Burton's <i>Anatomy of
+Melancholy</i>, and was none the worse for it. It is
+astonishing how little harm comes to children
+through books. Unless they have been taught
+by servants' chatter how to look for the "harm,"
+they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely
+every book is fit for a child's reading,
+but if you allow the reading of the Old Testament
+it is mere imbecility to insist that all the
+rest of your child's reading shall ignore the
+facts of life. You can always have a locked
+book-case if you choose: only see to it that
+the doors are not of glass, for the forbidden is
+always the desired.</p>
+
+<p>As regards the facts of life, by which I mean
+the physiological facts about which there is so
+much needless and vain concealment, there is,
+it seems to me, only one rule. If your child has
+learned to love and trust you it will come to
+you with its questions, instead of going to the
+housemaid or the groom. Answer all its questions
+truthfully, even at the cost of a little<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+trouble in formulating your answers. Do not
+leave the child to learn the truth about its body
+and its birth from vulgar and tainted sources.
+There is absolutely nothing that you cannot
+decently tell a child when it has reached the
+age when it understands that certain things are
+not fit subjects for public conversation&mdash;and
+until it has reached that age it will not ask that
+sort of questions. There is no difficulty in
+making children understand that their digestive
+processes are not to be discussed in general
+society, and it is quite easy to explain to them
+that other physiological processes are also to
+be avoided as subjects for general conversation.
+The Cat and her family will help you to explain
+all that the child wants to know. The child
+should be taught that its body is the Temple
+of the Holy Ghost, and that it is our duty to
+keep our bodies healthy, clean, and well-exercised,
+just as we should try to keep our minds
+strong and active, and our hearts tender and
+pure. And one need not always "talk down"
+to children: they understand far better than
+you think. They are always flattered by talk
+that rises now and then above the level of their
+understanding. And if they do not understand
+they will tell you so, and you can simplify. In
+talking of the subjects which interest them,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+you need not be afraid of being too clever.
+For even if they do not ask, your instinct and
+the child's eyes will, if there be love and trust
+between you, tell you when you are getting out
+of its depth. But there must be love and trust:
+without that all education outside book-learning
+is for ever impossible.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>The One Thing Needful</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">The</span> most ardent advocate of our present
+civilisation, the blindest worshipper of what
+we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware
+of the steadily increasing and brutal ugliness
+of life. Civilisation, whatever else it is, is a
+state in which a few people have the chance of
+living beautifully&mdash;those who take that chance
+are fewer still&mdash;and the enormous majority
+live, by no choice or will of their own, lives
+which at the best are uncomfortable, anxious,
+and lacking in beauty, and at the worst are so
+ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that
+those who feel their condition most can hardly
+bear to think of them, and those who have not
+imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear
+it unless they succeed in persuading themselves
+that the poor of this world are the heirs of the
+next, while hoping, at the same time, that a
+portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may,
+after all, be reserved for Dives.</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills
+and dales with factories and mines and pot
+banks&mdash;coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement
+of bright rivers with the refuse of oil and dye
+works; the eating up of the green country
+by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of
+streets; the smoke and fog that veil the sun in
+heaven; the sordid enamelled iron advertisements
+that scar the fields of earth&mdash;all the torn
+paper and straw and dirt and disorder spring
+from one root. And from the same root spring
+pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the
+mean subservience of the poor and the mean
+arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the
+green country is disfigured by all this machinery
+which ministers to the hope of getting rich, so
+is the face of man marred by the fear of getting
+poor. Look at the faces you see in the street&mdash;old
+and young, gay and sad&mdash;on all there is the
+brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety that never
+rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for
+the future: the fear of poverty for the rich,
+the fear of starvation for the poor. Think of
+the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering
+in the East of London&mdash;not in comfortable
+Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way;
+think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet
+and Bow&mdash;then think of Park Lane and Bond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the
+West is no less terrible than the East. If you
+want to be sure of this, bring a hungry, ragged
+child from that Eastern land and set it outside
+a West End restaurant; let it press its dirty
+little face against the plate glass and gaze
+at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling
+round the bright tables inside. The diners may
+be smart, the ragged child may be picturesque&mdash;but
+bring the two together, and consider the
+conjunction.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs22.png" width="500" height="355" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>And all this ugliness springs from the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+cause. As Ruskin says: "We have forgotten
+God." We have therefore forgotten His attributes,
+mercy, loving-kindness, justice, truth,
+and beauty. Their names are still on our lips,
+but the great, stupid, crashing, blundering
+machine which we call civilisation knows them
+not. The Devil's gospel of <i>laissez-faire</i> still
+inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for
+himself, and Mammon for the foremost. We
+no longer care that life should be beautiful for
+all God's children&mdash;we wish it to be beautiful
+for us and forget who, as we wish that wish,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+becomes our foster-father. There can be no
+healing of the great wound in the body of
+mankind till each one of us would die rather
+than see the ugliness of a wound on the body
+of the least of these our brethren. But so
+dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty, our
+sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds
+do not hurt us. We have not imagination
+enough to know how it feels to be wounded.
+Just as we have not imagination enough to see
+the green fields that lie crushed where Manchester
+sprawls in the smoke&mdash;the fair hills and
+streams on which has grown the loathsome
+fungus of Stockport.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs23.png" width="500" height="387" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES</span>
+</div>
+<p>Now I do believe that this insensitiveness to
+ugliness and misery, this blindness to wanton
+befouling of human life and the green world,
+comes less from the corruption of man's heart
+than from the emptiness of the teaching which
+man receives when he is good and little and a
+child. The teaching in our schools is almost
+wholly materialistic. The child is taught the
+botanical name of the orange&mdash;dissects it and
+its flower and perhaps learns the Latin names
+of the flower and fruit; but it is not taught
+that oranges are things you will be pleased with
+yourself for giving up to some one who is thirstier
+than you are&mdash;or that to throw orange-peel<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+on the pavement where some one may slip on
+it, fall and hurt himself, is as mean a trick as
+stealing a penny from a blind man. We teach
+the children about the wonders of gases and
+ethers, but we do not explain to them that
+furnaces ought to consume their own smoke,
+or why. The children learn of acids and
+starches, but not that it is a disgraceful thing
+to adulterate beer and bread. The rules of
+multiplication and subtraction are taught in
+schools, but not the old rule, "If any will not
+work, neither shall he eat."</p>
+
+<p>There is no dogmatical teaching. That means
+a diet of dry bones. It means that the child is
+never shown how to look for happiness in the
+performance of acts which do not, on the face
+of them, look as though they would make him
+happy. It is not explained to him that man's
+life and the will of God are like a poem&mdash;God
+writes a line and man must make the next line
+rhyme to it. When it does rhyme, then you
+get that happiness which can only come from
+harmony. And when you do your best to make
+your line rhyme and cannot&mdash;well, the Author
+of the first line knows that it was your best
+that you did. God is shown, when He is shown
+at all, to our modern children, as a sort of
+glorified head master, who will be tremendously<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+down on you if you break the rules: alternatively
+as a sort of rich uncle who will give
+you things if you ask properly. He is not
+shown as the Father to whom you can tell
+everything.</p>
+
+<p>If you are successful in your work you win
+a prize and go home to your people, and tell
+them that you are first in history, receiving
+their applause without shame.</p>
+
+<p>If you are good at games or athletics you
+can tell your mates that you made two goals
+or eighty-three runs or whatever it is, and
+delight in their admiration. If you are an
+athlete the applause of the bystanders is your
+right and your reward.</p>
+
+<p>But whom can you tell of the little intimate
+triumphs, the secret successes, the temptations
+resisted, the kind things done, the gentle refrainings,
+the noble darings of that struggling,
+bewildered, storm-tossed little thing you call
+your soul?</p>
+
+<p>God, your Father, is the only person to whom
+you can talk of these. To him you can say:
+"Father, I wanted to pay Smith Minor out
+to-day for something he did last week, and I
+didn't because I thought You wouldn't like it.
+Are You pleased with Your boy?" Do they
+teach you this in schools or give you any hint<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+or hope of what you will feel when your Father
+answers: "Yes, My son, I am pleased." Or
+do they teach you to say: "Father, I am sorry
+I was a beast to-day, and I'll try not to do it
+again"&mdash;and tell you that a Voice will answer,
+"I am sorry too, My son&mdash;but I am glad you
+told Me. Try again, dear lad. And let Me
+help you"?</p>
+
+<p>As you show your Latin exes. to your master,
+so you should be taught to show the leaves of
+your life to the only One who can read and
+understand that blotted record. And if you
+learn to show that book every day there
+will be less and less in it that you mind
+showing, and more and more that will give
+you the glow and glory of the heart that
+comes to him who hears "Faithful and good,
+well done."</p>
+
+<p>You cannot suppose that your life is rhyming
+with the will of God when you destroy the
+beauty of the country and of the lives of men
+so that you may get rich and you and your
+children may live without working.</p>
+
+<p>Can you imagine a company promoter who
+should say: "Father, I have made a lot of
+money out of a company which has gone to
+pieces, and a lot of other people are ruined,
+but I know that there must always be rich and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+poor, and if I didn't do it some one else
+would"?</p>
+
+<p>Or&mdash;"Father, I spoiled the green fields where
+children used to play and I have built a lot of
+streets of hideous and uncomfortable houses,
+but they are quite good enough for the working
+people. As long as they have such low wages
+they can't live like human beings. And Thou
+knowest, O Father, that wages are and must
+be regulated by the divine law of supply and
+demand."</p>
+
+<p>Or&mdash;"Father, I have put sand in the sugar and
+poison in the beer, alum in the bread and water
+in the milk, all these being, as Thou knowest,
+Father, long-established trade customs."</p>
+
+<p>Men can say these things to themselves and
+to each other, but there is One to whom they
+cannot say them. It is of Him and not only of
+the wonders of His Universe that I would have
+the children taught. But they are only taught
+of the wonders, not of the Wonder-worker.</p>
+
+<p>It is not that there are none who could teach,
+no initiates of the great and simple mysteries,
+no keepers of the faith. There are such, but
+they are muzzled, and the detestable horrors of
+civilisation go on in a community which calls
+itself after the name of Christ. And so long as
+we have in our schools this materialistic teaching,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+so long shall we raise up generation after
+generation to support that civilisation and to
+keep it the damnable thing we know.</p>
+
+<p>Talk goes on and goes on and goes on.
+There is talk now of a Great Measure for the
+Reform of National Education, much talk&mdash;there
+will be more. There will be much ink
+spilt, much breath wasted; we shall hear
+of Montessori and Froebel and Pestalozzi, of
+Science and the Classics, of opportunities of
+ladders of scholarships and prizes and endowments.</p>
+
+<p>We shall hear how hard it is that the sons of the
+plumber should not be able to go to Oxford and
+how desirable it is that daughters of the dustman
+should sometimes take the Prix de Rome.</p>
+
+<p>We shall be told how important are the
+telescope and the microscope, and how right it
+is that children should know all about their
+little insides. The one thing we shall not hear
+about will be the one thing needful.</p>
+
+<p>A tottering Government may keep itself in
+power by such a measure, a defeated party
+may, by it, bring itself back to office, but such
+a measure will not keep the nation from perdition,
+nor bring back the soul of a man into
+the true way.</p>
+
+<p>We may build up as we will schemes of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+Education and Instruction, add science to
+science, learning to learning, and facts to
+facts; but what we shall build will be only a
+dead body unless it be informed by the breath
+of the Spirit which maketh alive. For Education
+which teaches a man everything but how
+to live to the glory of God and the service of
+man is not Education, but only instruction;
+and it is the fruit of the tree, not of Life, but of
+Death.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2><i>PART II</i></h2>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Romance in Games</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A sharp</span> distinction can be drawn between
+games with toys and games without them. In
+the latter the child's imagination has to supply
+everything, in the former it supplements or
+corrects the suggestion of the toy. But in both,
+as in every movement and desire of the natural
+child, it is imagination which tints the picture
+and makes the whole enterprise worth while.</p>
+
+<p>In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and
+still more in its sister "I spy," a little live
+streak of fear brought down from who knows
+what wild ancestry lends to the game an excitement
+not to be found in games with bats
+and balls and nets and bails and straightforward
+trappings bought at shops. When you lurk in
+the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one
+who is hunting you, and to become in your turn
+the hunter, you are no longer a child, you are
+a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger
+or a black-fellow, according to the measure of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+your dreams and the nature of the latest book
+of your reading.</p>
+
+<p>At this point it occurs to me that perhaps
+you who read may have forgotten the difference
+between "Hide-and-seek" and "I spy."
+Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half
+the players hide, and the others seek them and
+there's an end of it. It is an interesting game,
+but flat compared with "I spy." It has,
+however, this merit, that it can be played without
+those screams to which grown-ups are,
+usually, so averse. Whereas I defy any one to
+play "I spy" without screaming. Hide-and-seek
+is a calm game; the thing sought for
+might almost as well be an inanimate object:
+it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants'
+eggs, of bears looking for honey. But "I spy"
+is the game of enemy looking for enemy: it
+calls for the virtues of fortitude, endurance,
+courage&mdash;for the splendours of physical fitness,
+for aptness, for speed. In "I spy" half the
+players hide and the others seek; but they seek
+not an unresisting stationary object, but a keen,
+watchful retaliatory terror. They seek, in
+shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house
+and conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge,
+and arbour, for the enemy, and when that
+enemy is found the seeker does not just say,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+"Oh, here you are"&mdash;that ending the game.
+Far otherwise; the seeker in "I spy" goes
+warily, his heart in his mouth&mdash;for, the moment
+he sees a hider, he must shout "I spy," adding
+the hider's name. "I spy Jimmy!" he cries,
+and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden
+one follows after&mdash;the hunted becoming in one
+swift terrible transition the hunter, and he
+who was the seeker flies with all the speed he
+may, across country, to the appointed "home."
+The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer
+and follows with yells. Grown-ups would
+always rather that you played hide-and-seek&mdash;and
+can you wonder? But sometimes they will
+concede to you "I spy" rights, and even join
+in the sport. It is always well, in playing any
+game where anything may be trampled, such as
+asparagus beds, or broken, such as windows, to
+have a grown-up or two on your side. And by
+"your," here, of course I mean children. The habit
+of years is not easily broken, and I am so much
+more used to writing <i>for</i> children than <i>of</i> them.</p>
+
+<p>Chevy Chase is a good old-fashioned game of
+courage and adventure. Does any one play it
+now? No child can play it <i>con amore</i> who
+does not know who it was who</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+When his legs were smitten off<br />
+He fought upon his stumps,<br /><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'>and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in
+the cup of defeat was "Earl Percy sees my
+face&mdash;&mdash;"</div>
+
+<p>All wreathed with romance are the song-games,
+"Nuts in May," "There came Three Knights,"
+and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing
+movement and the song of marriage-by-capture
+ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe to the
+vanquished! This is a very old game&mdash;and
+there are many words to it. One set I know,
+but I never have known the end. Little boys
+in light trousers and short jackets and little girls
+in narrow frilled gowns used to play it on the
+village green a hundred years ago. This is
+how it began:</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+Up and down the green grass<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">This and that and thus,</span><br />
+Come along, my pretty maid,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And take a walk with us;</span><br />
+You shall have a duck, my dear,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And you shall have a drake,</span><br />
+And you shall have a handsome man,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">For your father's sake.</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'>My mother told me all of that song-game, and
+that is all of it that I can remember. She always
+said she would write it down, and I always
+thought there was plenty of time, and somehow
+there was not, and so I do not know the end.
+Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+the Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody
+Else now so mysteriously gets all the credit, may
+know the end of these verses. If he does, and
+if he sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.</div>
+
+<p>This game of come and go and give and take
+is alive in France; witness the old song:</p>
+
+<div class='poem'>
+Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Compagnons de la Marjolaine?</span><br />
+Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Toujours si gai?</span><br />
+<br />
+Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Compagnons de la Marjolaine.</span><br />
+Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Toujours si gais.</span><br />
+<br />
+Et que veulent ces cavaliers,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Compagnons de la Marjolaine?</span><br />
+Et que veulent ces cavaliers<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Toujours si gais?</span><br />
+<br />
+Des jeunes filles ŕ marier,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Compagnons de la Marjolaine;</span><br />
+Des jeunes filles ŕ marier,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Toujours si gais.</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'>And I have no doubt that stout Dutch children
+and German children with flaxen plaits, and
+small contadine, and Spanish and Swedish and
+Russian and Lithuanian babes all move rhythmically
+back and forth on their native greensward
+and rehearse the old story of the fair
+maid and the Knight "out to marry."</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+The Mulberry Bush is another of the old song-games,
+where play-acting is the soul of the
+adventure, and this too is everywhere. "A
+la claire fontaine," I remember as the French
+version, danced on wet days in the cloisters of
+the convent of my youth. Le Pont d'Avignon,
+a glorious game, with its impersonations of
+animals, has, as far as I know, no counterpart
+in this country.</p>
+
+<p>All these games are active games: they can,
+of course, be played by sheer imitation, a sort
+of parrot-and-monkey aptitude will do it; but
+if they are to be enjoyed to the full, the imagination
+must have full play. To <i>be</i> a knight
+a-riding to fetch a fair lady is quite simple, and
+quite thrilling&mdash;just as to be a bear demands
+nothing but growls and a plantigrade activity
+in the performer to be a fearful joy to the
+non-bear.</p>
+
+<p>Cricket and football, fives and racquets, the
+games that are played with things out of shops,
+do not need imagination to help them out.
+The games without bought accessories should
+perhaps rather be termed "plays" than games.
+And the more highly cultivated the imagination
+the more intensely joyous are the games.
+All sorts of acting, dressing-up, and pretending
+games depend entirely on the imagination, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+it is well to encourage children to act scenes
+which they have observed, or heard about or
+read about. The smallest child will experience
+a real joy in putting its pinafore on wrong way
+round, call it a coat, and announce with pride
+that it is "Daddy going a tata."</p>
+
+<p>In the dolls' tea-parties you will observe a
+careful copy or travesty of your own "company
+manners," and as the small minds are filled
+with tales of wonder and adventure, you will
+find them re-enacted, the nursery rocking chair
+serving as charger for the gallant knight, and
+nurse's hassock taking quite adequately the
+part of the dragon. A small sister can generally
+be relied on to be the captive princess, especially
+if handsome trappings go with the part&mdash;and
+a cobweb brush is an admirable spear. The
+princess will be released from her bonds in time
+to act as chief mourner at the funeral of the
+slain hassock, which can be carried down the
+river in a barge made of the nursery table
+wrong way up&mdash;with the nursery tablecloth
+for a sail&mdash;an admirable tableau certain to
+occur if any one has told the children the story
+of Elaine. That the dragon should have as
+sumptuous a funeral as Enoch Arden himself,
+need not surprise you: a funeral is a funeral, be
+the corpse canary, guinea pig, or hassock, and to a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>
+dead dragon are due all the honours we pay
+to a gallant if unfortunate antagonist. Not
+only fairy tales, but history will be acted.
+You will have Jane as Queen Eleanor sucking
+the poison from Jack's grubby paws, and
+Alice as an Arab physician curing the plague,
+represented by blobs of paint-water on the
+rigid arms of Robert. How beloved will be
+the grown-up who, passing by the scene, shall
+refrain from commenting on the deafening
+groans of the patient, and shall, instead, offer
+the physician a ribbon for his girdle or a plume
+from the dusting brush for his turban.</p>
+
+<p>Exploring plays and all the plays which
+include wigwams and war paint are such as
+an intelligent grown-up will be able to intensify
+and add backbone to&mdash;for a child's
+fancy will naturally outrun his performance,
+and though he may imagine a feather head-dress
+or moccasins, he will be only too pleased that
+a grown-up should make the things for him
+with that strong, unerring touch to which his
+small experimenting hands cannot yet attain.
+All such games require numbers; your only
+lonely child cannot play Indians to the full.
+Two is better than one and more than two is
+better than two, up to the number of six or
+eight. People don't seem to see how important
+numbers are for play. They see it fast enough
+when it comes to schools, but a regular association
+of children for the purposes of play is not
+encouraged. In a large family of boys and
+girls it just happens happily, but an association
+of children from various homes generally means
+a predatory horde of boys: girls don't associate
+with unrelated girls in joyous play-adventures,
+and boys are apt to think that little girls who
+are not their sisters are either angels or muffs,
+and neither a muff nor an angel is what you
+want to play games with. Parents and guardians
+might do a great deal to render play-association
+possible: I suggest that house
+parties of children, where the utmost possible
+liberty should be given, would stimulate enormously
+the plays which encourage daring and
+initiative, and would teach boys that girls are
+not necessarily muffs or angels, and teach girls
+that boys are not all brutes.</p>
+
+<p>Fathers and mothers sacrifice themselves
+every year in August; you see them doing it,
+heavily, definitely, with clenched teeth and a
+grim determination not to be selfish, and to
+spend a month with the children at the seaside,
+however much it may cost in time, temper, and
+money. The Browns go to Scarborough, their
+friends the Robinsons go to Wales, the Smiths<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+are in Devonshire and the Joneses at Littlehampton.
+They all go to the same sort of
+lodgings, do the same sort of things, and lucky
+is the mother whose nerves are not worn very
+thin indeed before the holiday ends. Now
+suppose all these worthy and self-sacrificing
+parents agreed to pool their families and let
+Mr. and Mrs. Brown take charge of them all&mdash;in
+some jolly big house suited to the needs of
+so swollen a household. Sixteen children are
+really, in many ways, four times easier to manage
+than four&mdash;and at least forty times as easy to
+amuse. In fact, you don't need to amuse
+them&mdash;they will amuse themselves and each
+other: Mr. and Mrs. Brown will only have to
+adjust ebullitions.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the Smiths, Robinsons, and Joneses
+are having their holiday where they will. Their
+turn of having the children will come another
+year, when the Browns will be free to range the
+world in August, knowing that their children are
+safe and happy and are, thank you, having a
+much better time than they could have in small
+seaside lodgings, even with the undivided
+attention of their fathers and mothers. Besides,
+if I may for once take the part of the
+mothers instead of that of the children, what
+sort of holiday do you think the mother has,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+when to the ordinary routine of housekeeping
+at home are added the difficulties of housekeeping
+in unfamiliar surroundings, in a house
+of whose capabilities she has no experience,
+and with a landlady whose temper, as often as
+not, is as short as her tale of extras is long?
+The woman who works all the year round at
+the incredibly arduous task of making a home,
+answering week in and week out the constant,
+varying demands on all her complex mental
+and physical activities, does really deserve a
+real holiday. What is more, she needs it. She
+will be a better mother the rest of the year if
+she be allowed for that one month to be just
+a wife, and a wife on a holiday. The wife
+whose turn it is to take charge of the amalgamated
+families will find so great a change
+from the exclusive care of her own chickens
+that the change in itself will be a sort of holiday.
+And the children themselves, perhaps, will learn
+a little from the enforced separation from the
+fount of unselfish devotion, and appreciate their
+mother all the more if they have, be it only
+half-consciously, missed her a little even through
+the varied and joyous experiences of their
+month's house-party.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Building Cities</div>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> devotion of aunts has often stirred my
+admiration. The heroism of aunts deserves
+an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place
+to write that epic. Give me leave, however, to
+say that of all the heroic acts of the devoted
+aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than
+the self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful
+ladies to settle themselves down to play, in
+cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games
+bought at a shop, games in boxes. I am not
+talking of croquet, or even badminton, though
+these may be, and are, bought in boxes at
+shops. Nor do I wish to depreciate chess and
+draughts, nor even halma, the poor relation of
+draughts and chess, nor dominoes, which we
+all love. These games, so precious on wet days,
+or when other people have headaches, cannot
+be too highly prized, too assiduously cultivated.</p>
+
+<p>The rigours of the seaside holiday, too often
+in wet weather a time of trial and temper,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+would be considerably mitigated if chess and
+chess-board, draughts, dominoes, and halma
+were packed in the trunks along with the serge
+suits, the sandshoes, and the sun-bonnets. The
+games which I do so 'wonder and admire' to
+see aunts playing are the meaningless games
+with counters and dice: ill-balanced dice and
+roughly turned counters and boards that look like
+folding chequer-boards till you open them, and
+then you find all the ugliest colours divided into
+squares and circles or slabs, with snakes or motors
+or some other unpleasing devices on them. These
+games are all exactly the same in their primary
+qualities: the first of them that was invented
+had all the faults of all its successors. Yet
+dozens of new ones are invented every year,
+just to sell, and helpless children try to play
+them, knowing no better, and angel aunts abet
+them, knowing all.</p>
+
+<p>Grown-ups suffer a great deal in playing with
+children: it is not the least charm of a magic
+city that a grown-up can play it and suffer
+nothing worse than the fatigue incidental to
+the bricklayer's calling. Of course, most grown-ups
+will say that they would rather be burnt
+at a slow fire, or play halma, than be bothered
+with magic cities. But that is only because
+they do not understand. Try the experiment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+the next time you are spending a wet week-end
+in a country house where there are children.
+Get the children to yourself and ask your
+hostess whether you may borrow what you
+want for a game. The library is the best place
+for building: there is almost certainly a large
+and steady table: also there are the books. I
+need not urge you to spare the elegantly bound
+volumes, and the prized first editions, and the
+priceless folios and duodecimos in their original
+calf and vellum. You will find plenty of books
+that nobody will mind your using&mdash;the old
+<i>Whitakers</i>, bound volumes of the <i>Cornhill</i> and
+<i>Temple Bar</i>&mdash;good solid blocks for the foundations
+of your city. If there be a pair of candlesticks
+or an inkstand which match, you may
+make a magnificent archway by setting up the
+candlesticks as pillars and laying the inkstand
+on the top. You can see how this is done in the
+picture of the Elephant Temple. Get the children
+to bring down the bricks and enlist a friendly
+parlour-maid to let you have the run of the china
+cupboard, or a footman, if you are in that sort
+of house, to bring you the things you want on
+a tray.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs24-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs24.jpg" width="600" height="377" alt="model" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE PALACE OF CATS.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p>But it is much better if you can go alone
+over the house and choose what you really want.
+You invite the children to help you build, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+to build themselves. If they have never built
+a magic city you will find that they will presently
+desert their plain brick edifices to watch the
+development of your palace or temple. They
+will offer suggestions, and quite soon they will
+offer objects. They will begin to look about
+the room with their sharp eyes&mdash;and about the
+house with their keen memory and imagination,
+and produce the sort of things that look like
+the sort of things they think you might like
+for your building. They will wander off, returning
+with needle-cases, little boxes, shells&mdash;and
+"Would this do for something?" is the
+word on every lip. They are soon as much
+absorbed in the building as you are&mdash;and I
+take it you are an enthusiast&mdash;and your magic
+city grows apace. Then after a little while
+a grown-up, bored and out of employment, will
+stray into the library with "Hullo! what are
+you kids up to with all this rubbish?" and
+stand with his hands in his pockets contemplating
+the building industry. If you answer him
+simply and kindly, and don't resent his choice
+of epithet, it is almost certain he will quite soon
+withdraw a hand from his pocket and reach
+out to touch your magic walls with "Wouldn't
+it be better like that?" Admit it, and in
+hardly any time at all you have him building<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+on his own account. Another grown-up will
+stray in presently with the same question on
+his lips. He too will come to be bored and will
+remain to build, and by tea-time you will have
+collected every grown-up of the house-party&mdash;every
+grown-up, that is to say, with the right
+feeling for cities. It will surprise you to find
+how keen you will yourself become as the work
+goes on, and how it will call into play all your
+invention and your latent craftsmanship.</p>
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs25.png" width="500" height="505" alt="arch with cats" />
+<span class="caption">GUARDED ARCH.</span>
+</div>
+<p>You will be amazed at the results you can
+achieve with quite dull-looking materials, and
+still more will you be surprised at the increasing
+interest and skill of the grown-ups. When it
+is time to dress for dinner you will feel a pang
+of positive despair at the thought that your
+beautiful city, the child of your dreams and
+skill, must be taken down. It is like the end
+of the magic of Cinderella when her coach
+became a pumpkin, her horses mice and her
+coachman a fat rat. Now your domes are once
+more mere basins, your fountain basins are ash-trays,
+your fountains are but silver pen-cases
+and their gleaming waters only strips of the
+tin-foil that comes off chocolate or cigarettes.
+The walls of your palaces go back into the
+book-cases, and their façades return to the
+dull obscurity of the brick-boxes. The doors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+and the animals who stood on guard at the
+door-ways and terraces, on plinths or pillars,
+share in the dark rattling seclusion where
+many a wooden tail has been broken, many a
+painted ear lost for ever, but the tidying up
+has to be done: unless your hostess is one of
+those rare and delightful people who see what
+their guests like and lets them do it. In that
+case she may say "Oh! what a pity to disturb<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+the pretty thing! Why not let your city stay
+for a day or two, so that the children can build
+some more to it to-morrow. No, of course it
+won't be in the way&mdash;and wouldn't it be pretty
+if we lighted it up with fairy lights after dark?"</p>
+
+<p>Then your city really has a chance. The children
+will think of it till bed-time and fall asleep in
+the happy throes of their first town-planning.</p>
+
+<p>You may think that I exaggerate the charms
+of magic cities, because I happened to invent
+them, and you may be afraid that my swan,
+if you ever make up your mind to adopt it, may
+turn out to be an ugly and dispiriting duckling.
+I assure you this is not so. I have never met
+a child who did not like building magic cities,
+and not many grown-ups. Of course the love
+of them grows, like other loves, and the longer
+you can keep the city standing, the fonder you
+and your playmates will get of it. It will grow
+more and more finished in detail, and the ugly
+make-shifts will be reorganised and made neat
+with an irreproachable neatness. If the magic
+city game were played in schools, as I think
+it ought to be, a long table&mdash;or series of
+tables&mdash;could easily be kept for it, and the city
+kept standing and be added to from day to
+day. But it will not be the same sort of city
+as the one you build in the house where the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+parlour-maid lives and still less the sort that
+happens in the house where there is a butler and
+many silver boxes and cups and candlesticks.</p>
+
+<p>Now I come to write all this down it seems
+very trivial, and it will perhaps seem even more
+so when I come to tell you about the different
+things we made and used for magic cities. But
+it is not really trivial. I do not think I
+claim for the magic city game more than it
+justifies, and I will tell you, presently, why I
+think this. Of course, when you have finished
+your city, if you ever do finish it, you make up
+stories about it, and always, even when you are
+building it, you imagine how splendid it would
+be if you were small enough to walk through
+the arches of your city gates, to run along the
+little corridors of your city palaces. Of course,
+it would do quite as well if your city became big
+enough for you to run about in while still keeping
+your natural size&mdash;but it is somehow not
+really so cosy to think of.</p>
+
+<p>When I had built my first three or four
+magic cities this idea of getting into the city&mdash;being,
+of course, correct citizen-size&mdash;lived with
+me so much that I wrote a story-book about it
+called <i>The Magic City</i>,<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a> in which a boy and girl
+do really become the right size and enter into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+city they have built. They have there all the
+adventures whose wraiths danced before me
+when I was building courts and making palm
+trees and finding out the many fine and fair
+uses of cowries and fir-cones.</p>
+
+
+<p>This book, <i>The Magic City</i>, produced a curious
+effect. I hope I shall not look conceited
+(because really I am only proud) when I say
+that about my books I have had the dearest
+letters from children, saying pretty things about
+the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of
+the most heart-warming things in the world to
+get these letters and to answer them. And if
+I had letters like these I should have been
+only pleased and not disturbed. But the letters
+about the Magic City, though they were full of
+the pretty, awkward, delicious things that
+children write to the author of the books they
+like, held something else&mdash;a demand, severe
+and almost unanimous, to know how magic
+cities were built, and whether "children like
+us" could build one, and, if so, how? I got
+so many of these letters that I decided to build
+a magic city where any child, in London at any
+rate, could come and see it. And I built it at
+the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the
+<i>Daily News</i> arranged last year at Olympia.
+The history of that building would make a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+largish and intimate volume. The difficulties
+that beset a home-dweller when she goes out
+into the world, the anguish of misunderstandings
+which arise between the builder of magic
+cities and the people who lay linoleum and put
+up electric lights, the confusion which results
+from having packed in boxes and all mixed up
+the building materials which you are accustomed
+to look for as you need them in your own home,
+the extraordinary mass of people, the extraordinary
+kindness of people; for after all, it is
+the kindness which stands out. It is true that
+the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed
+the electric lights, behaved exactly like an
+earthquake, upsetting two temples, a palace,
+and a tank with an educated seal in it. But
+then how more than a brother was the man
+who did the whitewash! It is true that the
+dictator with the linoleum&mdash;but I will not
+remember these things. Let me remember
+how many good friends I found among the
+keepers of the stalls, how a great personage of
+the <i>Daily News</i> came with his wife at the last
+despairing moment, and lent me the golden and
+ruby lamps from their dining-table, how the
+Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get
+me some cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how
+their Scout Master gave me fourteen beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in
+my silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers
+on the one side and the home hobbies on the
+other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry
+Blossom Boot Polish lady gave me hairpins
+and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's
+bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted
+boy-sculptor for the Plasticine stall, moved by
+sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day and
+dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled
+by his own hands, in the sands about my
+Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came
+and talked to me for half an hour in the most
+flattering French, while the Deity from the
+<i>Daily News</i> looked on benign.</p>
+
+<p>These are things I can never forget. When
+the show opened I was feeling like a snail who
+has inadvertently come out without his shell.
+Think how all this kindness comforted and
+protected me. And then came the long stream
+of visitors&mdash;crowds of them&mdash;I don't know how
+many thousands, who came and looked at
+my magic city and asked questions, and looked
+and looked at it, looked and said things. It is
+because of what they said that I am writing
+about that show at all. They all liked the city
+except two, and I cannot think that those two
+were, in other respects, really nice people.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+And more than half of them asked whether I
+would not write a book about the magic city
+which I had built there, and which lay looking
+so real and romantic under the soft glow of
+the tinted lamps: not a story-book, but a
+book to tell other people how to make such
+cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in
+a book. And when I came to write I found that
+there were many other things that I wanted to
+write about children, and other things than magic
+cities, and I wrote them, and this is the book.</p>
+
+<p>And the reason I am telling you all this is
+that my big magic city at Olympia showed me,
+more than anything else could have done, that
+the building of magic cities interests practically
+every one, young or old.</p>
+
+<p>It is very difficult to say all this and yet
+not to feel that you will think that I am boasting
+about my magic city. But I want you to
+believe that it was very beautiful, and that
+you can build one just as beautiful or much
+more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such
+an easy game. Every one can play it. And
+every one likes it&mdash;even quite old people. By
+the way, I have been asked to build another city
+at Olympia in April, and I hope that it will
+be a prettier one even than the other which I
+loved so.</p>
+
+<div class='FOOTNOTES'><div class='author'><b>FOOTNOTE:</b></div><br />
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Macmillans.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class='chap' /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Bricks&mdash;and Other Things</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">It</span> is a mistake when you are going to build a
+city to make too large a collection of building
+materials before you begin to build. If it is
+natural to you to express yourself by pencil
+lines on paper you might perhaps draw an
+outline of the masses of your city as you see
+them in the architect's vision or illumination
+which should precede all building, either of
+magic cities or municipal cab-shelters. Having
+roughly indicated on paper the general shape of
+your city as you look at it from the front&mdash;the
+shape it would have against the western
+sky at dusk (I think architects call this the
+elevation, don't they?)&mdash;you proceed to collect
+such material as will roughly indicate that shape
+on the table or other building-place. And here
+let me once more warn the builder new to his
+business not to be trapped by the splendid
+obvious bait of floor's wide space. To build
+palaces while prone on the stomach may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+natural and easy to extreme youth. To grown-up
+people it is agonising and impossible. The
+floor has only two qualifications as a building
+site. It is large&mdash;larger at least than any of
+the pieces of furniture which stand on it&mdash;and
+it is flat. And when you have said that you
+have said all. Whereas the inconveniences of
+the floor as a place for building are innumerable.
+The floor is draughty, it is inaccessible,
+except from the attitude of the serpent, and
+the serpent's attitude, even if rich in a certain
+lax comfort, is most unfavourable for the steady
+use of both hands. If you want to see how
+unfavourable assume that attitude and try to
+build a card-house on the floor. You cannot do
+it. If you kneel&mdash;well, you know how hard the
+floor gets if you kneel on it for quite a little
+time; if you sit or squat your dress or your
+coat-tails insist on playing at earthquakes with
+your building. Also the city on the floor is
+liable to hostile invasion by cats or dogs or
+servants: to the crushing and scattering by
+short-sighted outsiders or people who rush
+into the room to look for something in a hurry.
+Think of a playful elephant in some Eastern
+court of carved pearl and ivory lattice; an
+elephant co-inciding with one of the more
+fanciful volcanic eruptions, and your conception<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+will pale into placidity in the face of the spectacle
+of a normal puppy in a floor-built city. And
+on the floor things not only get broken, they
+get lost. Cotton reels roll under sofas, draughts
+bowl away into obscurity and are only found
+next day by the housemaid when she moves
+the fender, and not then, as often as not;
+chess kings are walked on and get their crowns
+chipped; card counters disappear for ever, and
+it is quite impossible for you to keep an eye on
+your materials when you are grovelling among
+them. Therefore build on a table&mdash;or tables.
+Tables of different shapes, heights, and sizes make
+beautiful sites for cities. And bureaux are good,
+if you may take the drawers out and empty
+the pigeon-holes. I remember a wonderful city
+we made once: it was called the "City of the
+Thousand Lights," and it was built on a bureau,
+two large tables and three other smaller ones,
+all connected by bridges in the handsomest
+way. (The lids of the brick boxes make
+excellent bridges and you can adorn them to
+your fancy, and make impressive gate-houses
+at each end.) The bureau was the Temple of
+Mung, and we sacrificed a pale pink animal from
+the Noah's Ark at the shrine of this, the most
+mysterious of the Gods of Pegana. The thousand
+lights&mdash;there were not a thousand, really,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+but there were many luminous towers, with
+windows of a still brighter glow. You make
+them by putting a night-light in a tumbler&mdash;a
+little water first by way of fire insurance&mdash;and
+surrounding the tumbler by a sheet of paper
+with windows and battlements and fixed to a
+cylindrical shape by pins. The paper cylinders
+are, of course, fitted on outside the tumblers so
+that there is no danger of fire. All the same it is
+better to let a grown-up do the luminous towers.</div>
+
+<p>Having chosen your site and blocked out the
+mass of your buildings, you begin to collect
+the building material. For my own part I
+see the city I am going to build in the eye of
+the mind&mdash;or of the heart&mdash;so vividly and
+consistently that I never need to make notes
+of it on paper. I know when what I am building
+is not in accord with the vision, and then
+I pull it down. Truly in accord it never really
+is, but it approximates.</p>
+
+<p>Now when you have seen the silhouette of
+your city and begin to look for stuff to build
+with, you will instantly find that everything
+you can lay your hands on is too small. The
+bricks, even the boxes which contained them,
+are suited for the detailed building which is
+to come later, but now you want something
+at once bigger and less conventionally proportioned.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+Now is the time to look for boxes&mdash;not
+the carved sandal-wood boxes in which
+aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth cedarwood
+boxes in which uncles buy their cigars,
+though both these are excellent when you
+come to the details of your work, but for
+the mass you want real big boxes; if you
+have a large table, or tables, Tate's sugar
+boxes are not too large. Also there are the
+boxes in which starch is packed, and cocoa,
+and the flatter boxes which the lady at the
+sweet-shop will give you if she likes you, and
+sell to you for a penny anyhow. The boxes
+in which your father gets his collars, and the
+boxes in which your mother gets her chocolates,
+though not really large, should be collected at
+the same time, because they need the same
+treatment. I am assuming now that you are
+not building a city for an afternoon's amusement,
+but one for which you have found a safe
+resting place&mdash;a city that may take days to
+build and will not be disturbed for days. If
+you can once found your city in a safe place,
+and you are working at it day after day, you
+will go on thinking of more and more things to
+be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under
+your hands as naturally as a flower under the
+hand of summer.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs26.png" width="500" height="294" alt="boxes" />
+<span class="caption">BOXES.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>You have now your collection of boxes&mdash;but
+they are of plain, rough wood, and probably
+disfigured by coarse coloured printed papers
+telling what the boxes once held. These papers
+you wash off, and when the boxes are clean
+and dry, you paint or colour-wash them to suit
+your requirements. Now your requirements are
+large blocks of colours to match your bricks,
+and bricks are of three colours&mdash;white, terra-cotta,
+and stone colour.</p>
+
+<p>The stone bricks are stone colour and terra-cotta&mdash;oak
+bricks are very nearly stone colour&mdash;and
+there are white-wood bricks. To these
+three I would add a dark brown; and as this
+dark brown is not sold in boxes at the shops,
+you had better colour some of your bricks with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+it for yourself. Dark wood in a city gives a
+wonderful richness and helps the lighter colours
+more than you would think possible. A city
+in which some buildings are of dark wood will
+have an air of reality never achieved by a city
+where all is red or white or stone colour. By
+the way, among the stone bricks there are some
+blue ones, but you will always have enough of
+them, for they are the last things you will ever
+want to use.</p>
+
+<p>Your boxes then must be coloured either
+white, red, stone colour, or dark brown. In
+the white use either white paint&mdash;flat, not
+shining, or if that cost too much trouble and
+money, whitewash made of whitening, size, hot
+water and a pinch of yellow ochre or chrome
+powder to give it a pleasant ivory creaminess.
+There should be a good deal of size so that
+the whitewash does not come off on every
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>The red boxes can be painted to match the
+red bricks, or colour-washed (whitewash as
+before, but red ochre for colour).</p>
+
+<p>Stone colour is not a very satisfactory tint
+and too much of it makes for gloom. The lids
+and bottoms of the brick boxes will generally
+give you as much of it as you want. But if
+you desire stone colour you can make it by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+putting a pinch of raw umber in the whitewash.
+Or you can paint your boxes with this uninteresting
+tint&mdash;resembling the doors of back
+kitchens. With these paints or colour-washes
+you can make your odd many-shaped boxes
+into smooth-surfaced blocks to match your
+bricks: and not only wooden, but cardboard
+boxes can be treated in this way. All these
+colours can be bought in gigantic penn'orths
+at the oil-shops. But when I come to the
+dark brown, which I confess is my favourite
+colour, no cardboard box will serve your turn.
+You must choose clean, smooth wood, because
+the brown colouring is transparent, and the
+grain will show through. Your bricks will be
+smooth enough, and if the boxes are not smooth
+a little sand-paper will soon subdue their rough
+exterior. I suppose you know how to use
+sand-paper? If you just rub with your fingers
+you hurt your fingers and don't make much
+progress; the best way is to wrap the sand-paper
+round a flat piece of wood&mdash;a wooden
+brick will do&mdash;and rub with that.</p>
+
+<p>When your wood is all smooth you mix your
+stain. And here I make a present to all housewives
+of the best floor stain in the world. Get
+a tin of Brunswick black&mdash;the kind you put on
+stoves&mdash;and some turpentine. Mix a little of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+the black and a little of the turpentine in a pot
+and try it on the wood with a smooth brush&mdash;a
+flat brush is the best&mdash;till you have the colour
+you want, always remembering that it will be
+a little lighter when it is dry. When you have
+decided on the colour, paint your bricks and
+boxes on five out of their six sides lightly and
+smoothly, keeping to the grain of the wood,
+and not going over the same surface twice if
+you can help it. This is why a flat brush is
+the best: it will go right down the side of a
+brick and colour it at one sweep. Then stand
+each brick up on end to dry. When it is dry
+you can paint the under bit on which it has
+been standing. While you have stains and
+colours going it is well to colour some of your
+arches, and also such things as cotton-reels,
+and the little wooden pill-boxes that you get
+at the chemist's. Before colouring these boxes
+fill them with sand or stones and stick the lids
+on with glue. Otherwise they will not be
+heavy enough to build with happily.</p>
+
+<p>This painting or colouring should be done
+out of doors, or in an out-house, if possible.
+If you have to do it in the house spread several
+thicknesses of newspaper before you begin, and
+make a calm resting place for your painted
+things where they can dry at leisure and not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+be scarred with the finger-marks of her who
+"clears away."</p>
+
+<p>The earnest builder will keep a watchful eye
+on any carpentering that may go on in the
+house, and annex the smaller blocks of wood
+cut off the end of things, which, to an alien
+eye, are so much rubbish, but which are to the
+builder stores of price.</p>
+
+<p>If there are a few shillings to spare, the
+carpenter will, for those few shillings, cut you
+certain shapes which you cannot buy in shops&mdash;arches
+of a comfortable thickness and of
+satisfying curves, and slabs of board for building
+steps. These should be of varying lengths and
+thicknesses and made in sets of twelve steps,
+with two boards to each step, twenty-four slabs
+to a set. The biggest might be 1 in. thick
+and the bottom and largest slabs 12 by 6 in.,
+lessening to 6 by 1 in. The next set might be
+ľ in., and of corresponding proportions, then
+˝ in., then Ľ in. The two basic slabs of the
+ľ in. would be 9 by 4˝ in., and those of the ˝ in.
+would be 6 by 3 in. A set with Ľ in. steps
+(the basic slabs 3 by 1˝ in.) would complete the
+set. Flights of steps of many varying heights
+and sizes could be built with these slabs. Ask
+the carpenter&mdash;if the shillings are forthcoming&mdash;to
+save for you the curved pieces of wood<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+which come out of the arches. They are very
+useful for the bases of pillars, for towers and
+for the pedestals of statues or vases. Some
+of the arches, steps, and blocks should be
+coloured to match the red, white, and brown
+bricks.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 510px;">
+<img src="images/gs27.png" width="510" height="345" alt="more arches" />
+<span class="caption">ARCHES AND PILLARS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some of the boxes, particularly the larger
+ones, should have doorways sawn in them on
+opposite sides&mdash;it is pleasant to look <i>through</i>
+a building and see the light beyond; and if you
+are a thorough builder you can make a pillared
+interior which will delight the eyes of those who
+stoop down and peer through the doorway.
+A few narrow, oblong windows, high up, will<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+also be useful. You need not show them unless
+you wish: you can always conceal them by
+a façade of bricks.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs28.png" width="500" height="329" alt="court" />
+<span class="caption">PILLARED COURT.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another pleasant use of a big box is to cut
+out the top and sides and make a columned
+court of it, which, when cream-washed, dignifies
+your city with almost all the glory that was
+Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.
+The columns are cut from broom-handles&mdash;twopence
+each at the oil-shop, or, in the case
+of smaller boxes, from those nice round smooth
+wooden sticks which cost a penny and are used
+in ordinary life to thread window-blinds on.</p>
+
+<p>If you are going to make a city which is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+to stand for some time, a little thin glue is a
+good help to stability. If it is only a here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow
+city, Plasticine is
+good&mdash;the least touch of it seeming to make
+things safe which otherwise might totter to
+their ruin. But except as mortar Plasticine
+should be shunned. It is not good as a building
+material.</p>
+
+<p>Having now your bricks, boxes, arches,
+steps, and rounds, you may begin to block out
+your building. Quite soon you will begin to
+find that everything is too rectilinear. Even
+the arches and the rounds and the pillars and
+the pill-boxes cannot satisfy your desire for
+curves. This is the moment when you will
+begin to look about you for domes. And the
+domes, on the instant of their imposition in
+your building, will call out for minarets. It is
+then that you will wander about the house
+seeking eagerly for things that are like other
+things. Your search will be magnificently successful,
+if only the lady of the house has given
+you a free hand, and you have been so fortunate
+as to secure the sympathies of the kitchen
+queen.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>The Magic City</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">The</span> only magic in the city is the magic of
+imagination, which is, after all, the best magic
+in the world. The idea of it came to me when
+I was dissatisfied with the materials provided
+for children to build with, and I think it must
+be a really true idea, because wherever I have
+applied it, it has worked, and that, I am told, is
+in accordance with the philosophy of pragmatism
+and a characteristic of all great discoveries.
+You may build magic cities in homes of modest
+comfort, using all the pretty things you can lay
+your hands on. You may build them in the
+mansions of the rich, if the rich are nice people
+and love cities, and if the butler will let you
+have the silver candlesticks for pillars, and the
+silver-gilt rose-bowls for domes; and you could
+build one in the houses of the very poor, if the
+very poor had any space for building&mdash;build
+them there and not use a single thing that
+could not be begged or borrowed by an intelligent
+child, no matter how poor.</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Children love to build. I still think with
+fond affection, and I am afraid speak with
+tiresome repetition, of those big oak bricks
+which we had when we were children. They
+disappeared when we left the old London house
+where I was born. It was in Kennington, that
+house&mdash;and it had a big garden and a meadow
+and a cottage and a laundry, stables and cow-house
+and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger
+lilies and flags in the garden, and chrysanthemums
+that smelt like earth and hyacinths
+that smelt like heaven. Our nursery was at
+the top of the house, a big room with a pillar
+in the middle to support the roof. "The
+post," we called it: it was excellent for playing
+mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at. The
+skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the
+stake. When we left that house we went to
+Brighton, where there was a small and gritty
+garden, where nothing grew but geraniums and
+calceolarias. And we did not have our bricks
+any more. Perhaps they were too heavy to
+move. Perhaps the Brighton house was too
+small for the chest. I think I must have
+clamoured for the old bricks, for I remember
+very well the advent of a small box of deal bricks
+made in Germany, which had indeed two arches
+and four pillars, and a square of glass framed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+in wood daubed with heavy, ugly body colour,
+and called a window. But you could not build
+with those bricks. So there was no building
+at Brighton except on the beach. Sand is as
+good as anything in the world to build with&mdash;but
+there is no sand on the beach at Brighton,
+only sandiness. There are stones&mdash;pebbles you
+call them, but they are too round to be piled
+up into buildings. The only thing you can
+play with them is dolls' dinner parties. There
+are plenty of oyster shells and flat bits of slate
+and tile for dishes and plates&mdash;and it is quite
+easy to find stones the proper shape and colour
+for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of
+mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince
+pies, pork pies, roast hare or calf's head. But
+building is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>In the courtyard of our house in France
+there was an out-house with a sloping roof
+and a flat parapet about four feet high. We
+used to build little clay huts along this, and
+roof them with slates, leaving a hole for a
+chimney. The huts had holes for windows
+and doors, and we used to collect bits of candle
+and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy
+the lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings
+till some one remembered us and caught us, and
+sent us to bed. That was the curse of our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+hut-building&mdash;the very splendour of the result
+attracted the attention one most wished to
+avoid. But clay was our only building material,
+and after the big bricks were lost I never had
+any more bricks till I had children of my own
+who had bricks of their own. And then I played
+with them and theirs. And even then I never
+thought of building magic cities till the Indian
+soldiers came.</p>
+
+<p>They were very fine soldiers with turbans
+and swords and eyes that gleamed in quite a
+lifelike way, riding on horses of a violently
+active appearance: they came to my little
+son when he was getting well after measles or
+some such sorrow, and he wanted a fort built
+for them. So we rattled all the bricks out of
+their boxes on to the long cutting-out table
+in the work-room and began to build. But
+do what we would our fort would not look like
+a fort&mdash;at any rate not like an Eastern fort.
+We pulled it down and tried again, and then
+again, but no: regardless of our patient energy
+our fort quietly but persistently refused to look
+like anything but a factory&mdash;a building wholly
+unworthy of those military heroes with the
+prancing steeds and the coloured turbans, and
+the eyes with so much white in them. So
+then I wondered what was needed to give a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+hint of the gorgeous East to the fort, and I
+perceived that what was wanted was a dome&mdash;domes.</p>
+
+<p>So I fetched some brass finger-bowls and lustre
+basins off the dresser in the dining-room and
+inverted one on the chief tower of our fort, and
+behold! the East began to sparkle and beckon.
+Domes called for minarets, and chessmen on
+pillars supplied the need. One thing led to
+another, and before the day was over the Indian
+horsemen were in full charge across a sanded
+plain where palm trees grew&mdash;a sanded plain
+bounded only by the edges of the table, along
+three sides of which were buildings that never
+rose beside the banks of Thames, but seemed
+quite suitable piles to reflect their fair proportions
+in the Ganges or the Sutlej, especially
+when viewed by eyes which had not had the
+privilege of gazing on those fair and distant
+streams.</p>
+
+<p>I learned a great deal in that my first day of
+what I may term romantic building, but what
+I learned was the merest shadow-sketch of the
+possibilities of my discovery. My little son,
+for his part, learned that a bowl one way up is
+a bowl, a thing for a little boy to eat bread and
+milk out of; the other way up it is a dome for
+a king's palace. That books are not only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+things to read, but that they will make marble
+slabs for the building of temples. That chessmen
+are not only useful for playing that difficult
+and tedious game on which grown-ups are so
+slowly and silently intent, or even for playing
+all those other games, of soldiers, which will
+naturally occur to any one with command of
+the pleasant turned pieces. Chessmen, he
+learned, had other and less simple uses. As
+minarets of delicate carved work they lightened
+the mass of buildings and conferred elegance
+and distinction, converting what had been a
+block of bricks into a pavilion for a sultan or
+a tomb for a sultan's bride.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 510px;">
+<img src="images/gs29.png" width="510" height="224" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There was a little guard-room, I remember,
+at the corner of our first city, and there has
+been a little guard-room at the corner of every
+city we have built since. In simple beauty,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+that little guard-room seemed to us then to
+touch perfection. And really, you know, I
+have not yet been able to improve on it. The
+material was simplicity itself: six books, five
+chessmen, and a basin; and you see here how
+the guard-room looked when it was done.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 389px;">
+<img src="images/gs30.png" width="389" height="525" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">THE GUARD ROOM.</span>
+</div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 492px;">
+<img src="images/gs31.png" width="492" height="525" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">THE DOMINO DOOR.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 463px;">
+<img src="images/gs32.png" width="463" height="575" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">LARGE PALM.</span>
+</div>
+<p>There was a black box, I remember, standing
+on another box, with domino steps. It needed
+a door, and we made it a door of ivory with
+the double blank of the dominoes, and a portico
+of three cigarettes&mdash;two for pillars and one to
+lie on the top of the pillars and complete the
+portico. You have no idea how fine the whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+thing looked&mdash;like a strong little house of ebony
+and ivory&mdash;a little sombre in appearance perhaps,
+and like a house that has a secret to keep,
+but quite fine. The palm trees we made out of
+pieces of larch and yew fastened by Plasticine
+to the tops of elder twigs&mdash;and elder twigs have
+a graceful carriage, not too upright and yet
+not drooping. They look very like the trunks
+of tropical trees. But if you have not elders
+and larches and yew trees to command, you can
+make trees for your city in other ways. For
+little trees in tubs we had southernwood stuck
+in cotton reels&mdash;these make enchanting tubs,
+and there are a good many different shapes, so
+that your flower tubs are pleasantly varied.
+Fir cones we found useful, too; they made
+magnificent <i>chevaux de frise</i>.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p>On the first day of building what we soon
+came to call magic cities we trusted to inspiration;
+there was no time for thought. And this
+day was perhaps the most interesting day of
+all&mdash;for we had everything to learn. One of the
+things which I learned was that this magic city
+game was an excellent training for eye and hand,
+as well as for the imagination and the more
+soothing of the domestic virtues. The eye is
+trained to perceive likenesses and differences in
+the shapes and colours of things&mdash;to notice, as I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+said, that a bowl is a dome wrong way up, and
+that cigarettes are like white pillars. A beautiful
+yet sinister temple might be built with
+cigars for pillars and cigar-boxes for pediments,
+if cigars were the sort of things you were ever
+allowed to play with. You see that yew and
+larch and elder can be made to look like palm
+trees, and that shrubs in tubs are really like
+sprigs of southernwood in cotton reels. You go
+about with eyes newly opened to form and
+colour: you look at every object in a new light,
+trying to see whether it is or is not like something
+else&mdash;something that can be used in your
+magic city. You notice that a door is much
+the same shape as auntie's mother-of-pearl card-case,
+and your architectural instinct, already
+beginning to develop, assures you that a pearly
+door would be a beautiful thing for a temple,
+if only auntie sees things in the same light as
+you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is
+straight and narrow, as a path leading to such
+a door might be, and that if you stick tiny tufts
+of southernwood or veronica into the holes
+along the ivory sides of your path, your path
+will run between two little green hedges. You
+will notice that books make colonnades darkly
+mysterious if the lids of the brick boxes are
+laid along the back and along the top, and
+that based on these solidly built colonnades
+your bricks and arches will rise in galleries of
+unexpected dignity and charm. The building<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a><br /><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+itself, the placing of bricks and dominoes, and
+books and chessmen and bowls, with exactness
+and neatness, is in itself a lesson in firm and
+delicate handling, such a lesson as is impossible
+if you are building with bricks alone. The call
+on the imagination is strong and clear. A house&mdash;the
+meanest hut&mdash;cannot be built without a
+plan or without an architect, though the architect
+may be only a little child and the plan
+may be only a little child's dream. To build
+without a plan is to heap bricks one on another,
+to make a cairn, not a house. The plan for
+the magic city, then, gets itself dreamed&mdash;the
+child's imagination learns to know what the
+bowl will look like when it is upside down, and,
+presently, what sort of bowls and books and
+bricks are needed to give to the cloud-capped
+palace of its desire some shadow in solid fact
+perceptible to the senses. To create in the image
+of his dream is the hope and the despair of
+every artist. And even though the image be
+distorted&mdash;as in all works of art, even the
+greatest, it always must be&mdash;yet it is joy even to
+have created the poorest image of a dream.</p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<a href="images/gs33-big.jpg"><img src="images/gs33.jpg" width="600" height="407" alt="MODEL" /></a>
+<span class="caption">THE MAGIC CITY.</span>
+</div>
+<p>And in the labour of creation will blossom
+those domestic virtues which best adorn the
+home; patience&mdash;for it is not often that for
+the young architect dream and image even<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+vaguely coincide at the first effort, or the second
+or the third; good temper, for no one can build
+anything in a rage. The spirit of anger is the
+enemy of the spirit of architecture. And
+besides, being angry may make your hand
+shake, and then nothing is any good. Perseverance
+too, without which patience is a mere
+passive endurance. All these grow strong while
+you build your cities and try to make visible
+your dream.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean that a child building a city
+sees all of it at once&mdash;in every detail; I don't
+suppose even the heaviest of architects does
+that. But I mean that he sees the masses of
+it with the eye of the mind and arrives by
+experiment at the details that best suit those
+masses. If the glass ash-tray will not do, the tea-cup
+without a handle will&mdash;or perhaps the flower-pot
+saucer, or the lid of a cocoa-tin.... One
+must look about, and find something that <i>will</i>
+do, something which when it is put in its place
+will seem the only possible thing. I don't know
+how real architects work, but this is how you
+work with magic cities.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Materials</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">You</span> wander round the house seeking beautiful
+things which look like other beautiful things.
+Let us suppose that you have the run of a house
+where beautiful things are. I will tell you
+afterwards what to do in the house where
+beautiful&mdash;or at any rate costly&mdash;things are
+not. It is best when the owner of the house
+is an enthusiastic member of the building party;
+then she will grudge nothing.</div>
+
+<p>In the drawing-room you will find silver
+candlesticks and a silver inkstand. The candlesticks
+are like pillars. Put the inkstand across
+the pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled
+splendour. If there be a silver-backed
+blotting-book, take it. It will make the great
+door of your greatest temple. Silver bowls
+should not be passed by, nor bronzes. A vase
+of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony
+elephants crowns a flat pillared building with
+splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+Egyptian gods that have lain a thousand years
+safe in their bronze amid the sands of the desert,
+cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in
+the shadow of the tent, and now decking the
+mantelpiece of the room you are looting. Little
+silver figures of knights in armour and what not&mdash;take
+them if you get the chance. Chessmen,
+too, as many as you can get, the carved ivory
+ones, of red and white, and the black and brown
+kind where the heads of the kings and queens
+are so like marbles and those of the pawns like
+boot-buttons; draughts too, and spillikins, and
+those little metal animals, heavy and coloured
+life-like, which you see on glass shelves in the
+fancy shop: take them too. They will serve
+other uses than those to which you will dedicate
+your Noah's Ark animals. Card counters, especially
+the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and
+dominoes, and the willow-pattern pots and a
+blue cup or so from the glass-fronted cupboard.
+Take all these, always giving preference to the
+things that you will not be asked to put back
+the same day. Little Japanese cabinets, tea-caddies
+of tortoiseshell or wood or silver, silver
+boxes&mdash;and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do
+not take the playing cards that people play
+bridge with: these are never quite the same
+after they have been used in magic cities, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+the Queen of Hearts always gets lost. You can
+usually acquire odd packs of cards that nobody
+wants. Those with black and gold backs are
+the best. They make gorgeous pagodas, and
+a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it
+should be.</p>
+
+<p>In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps,
+at least you can in mine, brass finger-bowls, and
+the lids of urns and kettles from the dresser&mdash;egg-cups
+and mugs and basins of lustre and of
+blue. Also those very little pewter liqueur-cups
+from Liberty's, and the tumblers for your towers
+of light, if you are going to have any. The
+library will yield you books and atlases&mdash;very
+useful for roofs these last, if they do not slope
+too much from back to edge; if they do, you
+can get even with them by wedges of paper laid
+in on the thin side.</p>
+
+<p>But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground,
+and here you will make a good bag
+even in those houses where you are not
+allowed any of the treasures from the drawing-room
+or the dining-room.</p>
+
+<p>Tins&mdash;tins of all kinds and shapes, from the
+tin that once held Bath Olivers and its lesser
+brother where coffee once lived to the square
+smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard,
+pepper, and so forth.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs34.png" width="500" height="365" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">HONESTY PILLARS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter,
+patty pans, and those little tall tins that
+you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden
+moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and
+swans upon pats of butter, the kitchen mortar,
+especially the big marble one, so heavy that
+cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware
+bowls and stewing-pots, the lids of tea-pots,
+clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and
+jars that have held jam&mdash;especially the brownish
+corrugated kind of jar&mdash;all these things and
+many more you may glean in a kitchen whose
+Queen is kind.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One of the most beautiful buildings I have
+ever made was built of kitchen things, and bricks
+and the boxes of bricks, a few shells, and a few
+chessmen.</p>
+
+<p>The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and
+a Bath Oliver tin, very brightly polished; the
+windows and doors and crenellations are of black
+<i>passe-partout</i>, that nice gummed paper which you
+buy in reels for binding pictures and glass together
+when you don't want to have picture-frames.
+On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver
+urn, a silver butter dish, and a silver jam-jar.
+A salt-cellar (wrong way up, with a white
+chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with <i>passe-partout</i>
+doors and windows stand at the base of
+the tower, and turrets are made of round bricks
+and draughts, with the chess castles on the top.
+The porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white
+chess king on it, and on each side two books
+with a binding of white and pale gold. Along
+the top of the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes;
+on these are two rounds that happened
+when the arches were being cut out. On these
+little pearl shells are glued, and little roofs of
+blue tiles complete the porch. Behind these
+more books, white and pale gold with marbled
+sides, lead up to the platform on which the
+great tin towers rise up against the snowy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+background (linen sheets over the backs of
+chairs). The lower building is of the boxes of
+bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large
+blue jar crowned with a silver egg-cup, a
+flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and some blue
+and white tiles. An Egyptian god stands at
+the corner of the upper and the lower building,
+and two green trees with white roses grow
+out of a tomb at the left. The pathway
+is of tiles edged with fir cones, and two rose-trees
+within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its
+beginning; the whole thing was blue and silver
+and black, and I wish I could show you a coloured
+picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up
+for you to see.</p>
+
+<p>The lower platform on the right is a box faced
+with silver seed-vessels of honesty, and the
+arches and court are red. The steps are made
+of blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red
+bricks and the water where the seal swims is
+silver paper. In front is a pavement made of
+mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside
+of the court is made of one large red tile with
+a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with
+a square board painted red, and counters laid
+on it.) The fountain in the middle is a brass
+match-box and the waters that rise from it
+are silver paper; but in the picture the water<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+of the fountain seems to have been blown aside
+by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those
+desolate regions of snow." You can build just
+such another tower and castle with the things
+you have, but when once you start building you
+will most likely think of some other way, quite
+different from mine, and just as good.</p>
+
+<p>Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you
+have an uncle who is an architect he will have
+any number sent to him as samples, and he will
+be rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles
+are all eminent in other walks of life it is a pity,
+but you are probably friends with the man who
+papers and paints your house, or the man who
+comes when the pipes burst at Christmas, or
+the man who comes about the gas, or the man
+who knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen
+range. It will be strange if none of these can
+get you a few coloured tiles when once they know
+you want them. It is well, if you are a child
+with a taste for building, to take pains to become
+acquainted with all the men who come to your
+house to do interesting things with tools and
+wood and iron and lead. Quite apart from the
+joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes,
+and thinking how easy it would be to
+be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself, there
+are all sorts of things left over from their work<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+which are of no use to them, but may be of
+much use to you. All sorts of screws and nails,
+for instance, these generous men will now and
+then bestow&mdash;little screws of dry colour, little
+pieces of brass, door-knobs and finger-plates,
+thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers,
+lengths of pleasantly coloured wall-paper&mdash;the
+wrong side of which, being plain, can be used
+for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful
+too, especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths&mdash;and
+cut <i>straight</i>. The sections make excellent
+and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of
+brass tubing are useful too&mdash;in fact, brass objects
+of all sorts deserve your careful consideration.
+Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must
+have a good deal of metal about it, as the
+cities in Atlantis did.</p>
+
+<p>As I write I see more and more clearly that
+a sharp distinction must be drawn between
+cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and
+cities that can be kept going and added to day
+by day for weeks. You may often be fortunate
+enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room
+and to use the spoils for a building that only lasts
+a day, but no one will strip her rooms of all
+the pretty things you want and let you keep them
+for weeks. Therefore if you are going to build
+a city that is to go on, you must collect the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+materials of your own, and the odds and ends
+that amiable workmen will readily give you
+will take a useful place in your collection. If
+you let it be known that you want odds and
+ends of pretty and simple shapes, your friends
+will save them for you, and you will gradually
+amass the things you need. I know well
+enough that there will have to be a place to
+keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear
+out all the toys you never play with, will hold
+a good deal, and many of the things you collect
+will do for other purposes as well as for the
+building of cities.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>Collections</div>
+
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs35.png" width="500" height="399" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">TREES.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">First</span> in your building collection will be the
+boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken.
+Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you
+probably have. Odd chessmen&mdash;quite beautiful
+ones can often be bought for a few pence&mdash;are
+very valuable for our purpose. The black
+and red halma men are very useful too, but
+the yellow and green always look cheap and
+nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is
+silver paper. Glass drops off old chandeliers
+are good for fountains, and pieces of green
+cloth for grass plots. The back of green wall-paper
+does for this, too; and very realistic grass
+lawns can be made by chopping up the long green
+grass that people sell for fire screens. It is
+really sedge finely split up, and dyed. You
+cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and
+when you have about a teacupful you take
+a square of stiff cardboard and cover it all over
+with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+to cool, you sprinkle your chopped grass thickly
+all over it and leave it to dry. Next day, <i>not
+before</i>, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard
+over so that the loose grass falls away on to
+the paper. Fasten down your grass plot in a
+suitable place in your city and build a little
+red brick wall round it with a little arched
+gateway, and you will have a neat and charming
+enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured
+tobacco makes good mould, and shows
+up your little rose-trees. You can make standard
+rose-trees of loofah&mdash;dyed green, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+stalks of long matches painted brown. The
+roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or
+white immortelles, and the whole effect is
+just what you are trying for. Large trees can
+be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles
+glued on, and they will last fresh and
+pretty about a week. Palm trees can be made
+of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.</div>
+
+<p>Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about
+half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread
+round and round closely and, very like splicing
+a cricket bat, work downwards towards the
+thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten the end
+very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton
+reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the
+loose ends of the grass, fold them back level, cut
+the stem.</p>
+
+<p>For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood,
+lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming
+little trees.</p>
+
+<p>Shells are extremely useful for decoration and
+produce the effect of carving. Almost all shells
+will be useful in one way or another, but I have
+found the most satisfaction in the gray and
+pearly shells which you find among the thick
+seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs
+of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly
+shells that lie on the rocks below the white<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly
+on arches and pillars you will find them
+very handsome adornments.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs36.png" width="500" height="250" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">THICK ARCHES.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Keep your shells in boxes. There are always
+plenty of boxes in the world, and if not boxes,
+little bags will do to hold the different kinds
+of shells. It is well worth while to keep the
+different kinds separate. The work of sorting
+out the shells is very damping to the eager
+enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative
+design. Indeed, it is well to keep all your
+building materials sorted each according to its
+kind, the wooden things together and the metal
+things and, above all, the crockery things.
+Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and
+the bricks in their boxes, and when you are
+going to build don't get everything out at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+once and make a rubbish heap of it on the
+floor.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs37.png" width="500" height="490" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">FAN WINDOW.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>As you grow more accustomed to building,
+you will find that sometimes you build a
+temple or palace that charms you so much that
+you wish to build it again; and you will soon
+learn what are the materials needed, and just
+take out those and a few more from your store.
+I say a few more, because you will never build
+your temple or your palace twice <i>exactly</i> the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+same: you are sure to think of some improvement,
+however small.</p>
+
+<p>I have made beautiful windows with the
+sticks of an old ivory fan, framed in dark wood
+bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above
+with elephant tusk shells and others, and below
+with carved ivory card counters.</p>
+
+<div class="figright" style="width: 449px;">
+<img src="images/gs38.png" width="449" height="600" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a certain Elephant Temple which I
+have built many times. Its floor is a red and
+white chessboard, and its roof is supported on
+a double row of white pillars. White pillars
+surround the altar&mdash;a wooden box&mdash;on which
+the ebony elephant stands. On each side of
+him are red fairy lights, hidden by buttresses
+from the human eye which peeps through the
+brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and
+falling full on the elephant on his pillared shrine.
+The walls are of big red books&mdash;<i>Sheridan's Plays</i>,
+<i>Tom Jones</i>, and Boswell's <i>Life of Johnson</i>. The
+roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing
+case, stained a dark brown like the bricks.
+On the side are the windows made of the
+ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant
+tusk shells. There is a door, too, a mother-of-pearl
+one; in a former life it was the card-case
+of a much-loved aunt, who nobly contributed
+it to the Temple. Above this door is a white
+animal from the Noah's Ark.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained
+brown wooden bricks. The other side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+shows between dark buttresses the red of the
+books, and towards the back of this side are
+small square buildings&mdash;wooden boxes stained
+brown&mdash;with brass domes and mysterious doorways.
+I think the priests and attendants of
+the Temple live here.</p>
+
+<p>The front of the Temple shows a little of the
+red between dark buttresses, which, here, are
+ornamented with delicate dark carved chessmen.
+The gate is of pierced brass&mdash;two finger-plates
+for a door, and the brazen pillars of the
+portico are two candlesticks, which support a
+brass inkstand, on which stand two yellowish
+wooden chessmen. On the middle of the roof
+is a big lacquered wooden bowl&mdash;the kind that
+nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes
+or coffee. Above is a brass rose-bowl, on that
+a finger-bowl of inlaid brass, crowned with a
+black chess king. There are two dark arches
+with bed-knobs on them, and round the roof
+are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets
+made of dark bricks with chessmen on the
+top.</p>
+
+<p>In front of the pillars at the gate two black
+elephants stand on wooden plinths, and the fore-court
+of the Temple and the space at the side
+are paved with mother-of-pearl.</p>
+
+<p>I know the main things that are needed for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+this Temple, but its details are changed a little
+every time I build it.</p>
+
+<p>If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card
+counters you can make a beautiful pavement
+by pasting the shining pods of honesty in a
+pattern on a piece of dark brown cardboard, or
+dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if
+you do this you must build a little dark-wood
+brick wall all round to hide the brown paper
+edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little
+ones, to show off, by contrast, the massive
+splendour of your Temple. These honesty pods
+are a most useful substitute for mother-of-pearl.
+You can paste them on square pillars or on the
+fronts of boxes (houses I mean) or make sloping
+roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard
+fastened at the proper angle by tapes
+glued about a third of the way up. But as a
+rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities.
+A grass garden with paths of honesty, or a
+shell-built fountain basin in the middle, will
+add a charm to any city square. And by the way,
+don't be afraid of open spaces. Have as many
+buildings as you like, and mass them together
+as you choose, but let there be open spaces.
+They will be to your building as mounts are
+to pictures or margins to books. And for frame
+or binding, let there be a wall all round your<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+city. It gives a neatness and a completeness
+which enhance a hundred-fold all the qualities
+your city may possess.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs39.png" width="500" height="181" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">HONESTY ROOF.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>There are cardboard models of St. Paul's
+Cathedral, the Tower Bridge, and the Temple at
+Jerusalem. These are interesting in themselves
+and it is good to put them together. The
+Temple, which is sold by the Religious Tract
+Society, is really beautiful, and when you have
+set it up it looks like a model in ivory. The bridge
+and the Cathedral are of dull brown pasteboard&mdash;but
+they are interesting for all that. But
+when you are tired of these things as models,
+parts of them can be used with great effect in
+your building, especially if you paint the brown
+ones with aluminium paint, or even whitewash
+them.</p>
+
+<p>In the foreground of the picture of the Astrologer's
+tower you will see a little house which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+doesn't look as if it belonged where it is. And
+no more it does. It was put in just to show you
+what these little cardboard buildings are like&mdash;it
+is one of the gate-houses of the Tower Bridge,
+and the little white house on the parapet above
+the steps in the picture of the silver towers is a
+little gate-house out of another model.</p>
+
+<p>When you are collecting shells, you will find
+smooth flat stones of pleasing colours. Collect
+them&mdash;the thinner the better&mdash;you can make
+mosaic floors of them, fastening them in their
+place with glue or a very thin layer of Plasticine.
+Fir-cones of all shapes and sizes are useful, from
+the delicate cones of the larch to the great
+varnished-looking cones that fall from the big
+pine trees on the Riviera; they call them pineapples
+there&mdash;<i>pommes-de-pin</i>&mdash;and they use
+them for lighting fires. But you can use them
+for the tops of towers.</p>
+
+<p>A little, and only a very little, red tinsel
+paper is good to use, for the backs of shrines.
+It gives a suggestion of the glow of hidden
+lamps&mdash;or, put as windows near the tops of
+towers, it suggests the glow of sunset falling on
+jewelled casements. You can get it, and also
+bundles of stamped strips of gold paper, which
+should be used very sparingly indeed, from Mr.
+Bousquet, of the Barbican, in London City.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span>
+There are other things which could serve for
+part of your collection, but I have told about
+these in the chapter on poor children's cities,
+because the poorest child can get them. But
+they are desirable in any collection, such things
+as tobacco-tins, jam-jars, clothes-pegs, and the
+different kinds of common things that you can
+use for decorating the fronts and backs and sides
+of houses, if you have not enough bricks to
+build façades to them all. And remember
+always to make the backs of your houses as
+beautiful as the fronts. They may&mdash;and should&mdash;be
+plainer but not less beautiful. Do not be
+like the jerry-builders who spend all their
+decoration, such as it is, on the flat fronts of
+their villas, and leave the sides and back flat
+and ugly, and so that when you see the row of
+them from the railway they look miserable
+and dejected, as though they knew how ugly
+they were and were sorry.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>The Poor Child's City</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">When</span> my city was built at Olympia a great
+many school-teachers who came to see it told
+me that they would like to help the children in
+their schools to build such cities, but that it
+would not be possible because the children came
+from poor homes, where there were none of
+the pretty things&mdash;candlesticks, brass bowls,
+silver ash-trays, chessmen, draughts, well-bound
+books, and all the rest of it&mdash;which I
+had used to build my city. So then I said I
+would build a city out of the sort of things that
+poor children could collect and bring to school.
+And I did. My friends Mr. Annis and Mr.
+Taylor, who were helping me to explain the
+city and show it to visitors, helped me with the
+building. We did it in a day, and it was very
+pretty&mdash;so pretty that the school-teachers who
+came to see it asked me to write a book to say
+how <i>that</i> was done. And so I did.</div>
+
+<p>There are no words to express half what I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+feel about the teachers in our Council Schools,
+their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy,
+their devotion. When we think of what the
+lives of poor children are, of the little they have
+of the good things of this world, the little chance
+they have of growing up to any better fate
+than that of their fathers and mothers, who
+do the hardest work of all and get the least
+pay of all those who work for money&mdash;when
+we think how rich people have money to throw
+away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver
+collars, and eat chicken off china, while the little
+children of the poor live on bread and tea, and
+wear what they can get&mdash;often enough, too little&mdash;when
+we think of all these things, if we can
+bear to think of them at all, there is not one of
+us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if
+by our death we could secure for these children
+a fairer share of the wealth of England, the
+richest country in the world. For wealth, by
+which I mean money, can buy all those things
+which children ought to have, and which these
+children do not have&mdash;good food, warm clothes,
+fresh country air, playthings and books, and
+pictures. Remembering that by far the greater
+number of children of England have none of
+these things, you would, I know, gladly die if
+dying would help. To die for a cause is easy&mdash;you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+leap into the gulf like Curtius, or fall on
+the spears like Winkelried, or go down with
+your ship for the honour of your country. To
+lead a forlorn hope, to try to save one child
+from fire or water, and die in the attempt&mdash;that
+is easy and glorious. The hard thing to do is
+to live for your country&mdash;to live for its children.
+And it is this that the teachers in the Council
+Schools do, year in and year out, with the most
+unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody
+applauds or makes as much fuss as is
+made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten.
+In the face of enormous difficulties and obstacles,
+exposed to the constant pin-pricks of little
+worries, kept short of space, short of materials
+and short of money, yet these teachers go on
+bravely, not just doing what they are paid to do,
+but a thousand times more, devoting heart, mind,
+and soul to their splendid ambition and counting
+themselves well paid if they can make the
+world a better and a brighter place for
+the children they serve. If these children when
+they grow up shall prove better citizens, kinder
+fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than their
+fathers were, we shall owe all the change and
+progress to the teachers who are spending their
+lives to this end.</p>
+
+<p>And this I had to say before I could begin to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+write about how cities may be built of such
+materials as poor children can collect and bring
+to school.</p>
+
+<p>For I have to own that poor children live in
+such little crowded houses that there is no room
+for the building of cities, and in the courts
+and streets where they play they cannot build,
+for the passers-by would tumble over their
+cities, and the policemen would call it an obstruction.
+So if they have a city at all it must
+be where they have most of their pleasant plays&mdash;at
+school. Besides, the children I have in
+mind are so very poor, that no one child could
+possibly collect enough materials for a city.
+But a number of children could each of them
+bring a few things, and thus make up enough
+for the building. And in most schools there
+will be some children not quite so poor who can
+afford a penny or so for tinsel paper and the
+few things&mdash;colours, paints, and so on&mdash;that do
+not occur naturally in a house, even a well-to-do
+house. These, let us hope, will be able to furnish
+a few old chessmen, for there is nothing like
+chessmen for giving an air of elegance to domes
+and minarets. If you cannot get chessmen,
+small clothes-pegs are good. You can cut them
+in halves and then you have two kinds of
+minaret. They can be coloured red or dark<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+brown, or, if your city seems likely to lack
+metal, you can paint them with gold or aluminium
+paint. They look well when cut shorter as the
+battlements of buildings, rather like halma
+men, but of handsomer and more rotund proportions.
+Your halma man as you buy him in a
+box is ever a bit of a starveling. If you cut
+your peg into three, the middle section will
+make short round pillars to support little
+galleries, the roof being a strip of mill-board
+or the lid of a narrow box.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs40.png" width="500" height="285" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">CLOTHES PEGS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes and
+shapes are always easy to get. These can be
+coloured as explained in another chapter, and
+little doors and windows cut in them. But be
+sparing of windows; too many windows detract<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+from the dignity of your tower, and make it
+look like a factory. In poor schools there will
+not be many bricks, and something must be
+done to add variety to the façades of buildings
+when there are not enough bricks to cover or
+decorate your boxes. A good deal can be done
+with haricot beans, tapioca, and sago. Fasten
+the beans round the doorways and the windows
+with glue or seccotine or Plasticine. If you use
+glue let the bean-work be quite cold before you
+do anything else with it. "Next day" is an
+excellent rule. When the beans are quite firmly
+fixed, glue the surface all over and sprinkle <i>thickly</i>
+with tapioca so that not a bit of the box shows.
+Leave the tapioca lying on the surface till <i>next
+day</i>, then turn it up; the loose tapioca will fall off
+and leave a pleasant rough-cast-looking surface.
+Round cardboard boxes, such as muff-boxes or
+biscuit-boxes make splendid towers treated in
+this way. If you cannot get the little round
+yellow periwinkly shells, maize is very good if
+you cut each grain flat with a sharp knife, and
+fix the grains with glue as pillars and arches.
+Tin boxes or round tins polished to silvery
+brightness, with doors and windows and crenellations
+of black <i>passe-partout</i>, can be built into palaces of
+astonishing splendour, as you can see
+in the picture of the silver towers. But always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+beware of too many windows. Other excellent
+towers are jam-pots: you can paint them any
+colour you like, but I advise you to stick to
+terra-cotta, cream colour, and dark brown.
+Very pretty towers can be made of white jam-pots
+with windows and doors and crenellation
+of gold paper. Only you should outline the
+gold with ink or dark stain to make it show up
+against the white. Basins that are cracked
+make good domes, and you can almost always
+get a cracked basin, however poor you are;
+tea-cups that have lost their handles, or had
+a piece bitten out of them, are also not hard
+to get, and the lids of teapots that are broken,
+and of saucepans that have been burnt through,
+come readily enough to the hand of the collector.
+Honey pots and the little brown jugs that cream
+is sold in are easy to come by, and make Moorish-looking
+domes for buildings.</p>
+
+<p>When once you begin to build, you will find
+that all sorts of things that before looked neither
+useful nor beautiful become both, when they
+are built into your city. Look at the bedstead-knobs
+in the Elephant Temple, and the pepper-pots
+and the tea-cups on the top of the tower
+of pearl and red.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/gs41.png" width="500" height="335" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Those children who are lucky enough to go
+into the country for a holiday can collect fir-cones<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+and acorns; nicely shaped bits of wood are
+more easily come by in a country village than
+in a London slum. Acorns are most useful, both
+the acorn and the cup. A brown building with
+doors and windows outlined in acorn cups with
+their flat side set on with glue looks like a
+precious work of carved wood. If you can't
+get acorn cups, the shells of Barcelona nuts are
+good, but they are difficult to cut into the
+needed cup shape. The shells of pea-nuts on a
+stone-coloured building look like carved stones,
+but always the nutshell must fit its edges tightly
+and neatly to the surface and show as a little
+round neat boss. Your own observation will
+supply you with other little and valueless things,
+which will become valuable as soon as you stick
+them evenly and closely on a foundation of
+their own colour. The periwinkly shells and
+the maize grains look best on white wood. The
+shells of the cocoanut have a value all their
+own. The larger ones, sawn neatly in halves,
+make impressive domes for brown buildings,
+and half a small cocoanut shell will roof a
+cardboard box that has held elastic bands, and
+you can call it a thatched cottage or the hut of
+a savage chief. I called mine Cocoanut Cottage,
+and the Curator of my Botanical Museum lived
+there. The Chief Astrologer, of course, lived<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+at the top of his tower, which was a photographic
+enlarging apparatus. Ponds and rivers can be
+made with the silver paper that comes off
+cigarettes, and I have made a very impressive
+tower with match boxes, painted black and
+piled one on another so that the blue side shows
+in front, with a touch of red at each side.
+Black windows if you like. If you cannot
+get any chessmen the pinnacles of your buildings
+must be clothes-pegs, acorns, and fir-cones,
+with a very occasional piece of lead pencil or
+short piece of brass tubing with an acorn or a
+fir-cone on the top. Fir-cones, too, look quite
+baronial stuck upright on the posts of gates&mdash;and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+they are good edging for paths and roads.
+Pill-boxes make nice little turrets, and cotton
+reels, coloured to match the bricks and the
+boxes, are the finest flower tubs in the world.
+With sprigs of evergreen stuck in them, or a little
+made rose-tree, they look quite life-like and
+convincing, especially if you paste a circle of
+brown paper on the top of the reel, to look like
+mould, before you stick your shrub in the hole
+so conveniently placed in the reel, apparently
+on purpose to have shrubs planted in it. Cotton
+reels with acorns or fir-cones on them are good
+on the top of gate-posts.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 475px;">
+<img src="images/gs42.png" width="475" height="291" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">COTTON REELS.</span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figleft" style="width: 388px;"><a id="Page_187"></a>
+<img src="images/gs43.png" width="388" height="600" alt="" />
+<span class="caption">LATTICE WINDOW.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>These are just a few of the things that poor
+children can get and the way they can use
+them. The moment you begin to build you
+will think of a hundred things that I have not
+thought of, and a hundred ways of using them
+that I should not have thought of trying.</p>
+
+<p>If you can so arrange the site of your city
+that it need not be disturbed, it will grow in
+beauty day by day, and you will presently
+have to name a day to satisfy the children who
+will want to bring their parents to see it. If
+you give a school party no other attraction will
+be needed, and you will find that neither children
+nor parents will tire of examining your city as
+a whole and in detail, exclaiming at its beauty
+and marvelling at its ingenuity. And the
+children will love it. And so will you.</p>
+
+<p>If you are disposed to take a little more trouble
+with your towers, you can cover them with
+cement, and mould the crenellations and windows
+with your fingers. The cement is made
+of newspaper, size, and whitening. Tear up
+two newspapers and boil them in four quarts of
+water for three hours. Then pound the paper
+in a large mortar, or squeeze it in your hands
+till it is all pulp. It will have an unpleasing
+grey colour at this stage, but in the end it will
+be creamy white. Then add equal quantities
+of size and whitening and a pinch of yellow
+ochre, mix thoroughly and let the mixture get
+cold, when it is ready for use. If it is too thin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a><br /><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+warm it again, and add more whitening, but do
+not let the mixture <i>boil</i> after the size has been
+added. When the mixture with which you have
+covered your tower is dry,&mdash;it takes some days&mdash;it
+will be as hard as stone. A cocoa tin set
+on a treacle tin makes a very neat tower, as you
+will see by the picture. Square towers can
+also be made in this way, by covering square tins
+with the cement. In fact, with a little trouble
+and some tins of different sizes and shapes
+you could build a whole palace in this way.
+Doors can be made of black paper, and lattices
+of paper cut and folded, with black paper
+behind it, as you can see for yourself by the
+picture.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<div class='chaptertitle'>The End</div>
+
+<div class='unindent'><span class="smcap">You</span> will have noticed that though I began by
+pointing out that children differ as much as
+grown-up people do, and that the individual
+character and temperament of one child are not
+the character and temperament of another,
+yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of
+the child as though the needs of all children
+were the same. That is because, in the body of
+this work, I have been dealing with the needs
+of children as a genus, and not with those of
+the individual or species. There are certain needs
+common to all children, needs as universal as
+the need for food, raiment, warmth, and light.
+Such are the needs for sympathy and justice,
+leisure and liberty. These things are admitted
+by all but the driest economists to be
+the rights of adults, but not, alas! always
+admitted as the rights of children. And I
+have tried to show a little what it is that is
+essential to the true well-being of all children.
+The hungers and thirsts of the individual spirit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+cannot be dealt with by any but those in close
+relation to the individual child. I have tried
+to lay down broad outlines&mdash;to make suggestions,
+to point out pleasant ways leading to
+pleasant places. Parents, teachers, pastors and
+masters will make the application&mdash;or the
+variation&mdash;in every individual case.</div>
+
+<p>One of the things that is the matter with
+modern education is the absence of the conception
+of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character
+and temperament. For the matter of that
+it is this indifference to personality which makes
+the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain.
+Our education treats children as though they
+were all cast in one mould; it treats men and
+women as though they, in their sphere, differed
+not at all one from another. You will say that
+it is impossible, in a great country and a great
+school, to find out the personal tastes and wishes,
+hopes, dreams, powers, and possibilities of
+individuals, and you are quite right. That is
+why large schools and large communities fail
+so detestably in the very objects of their existence.
+Schools are intended to educate, and
+they merely instruct. Communities are, at least
+I suppose they are, intended to enable their
+members to live happy and useful lives as
+free citizens, and they only succeed in making<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+slaves of the many and tyrants of the few.
+The machinery of government and the machinery
+of so-called education is too big&mdash;what it has
+to deal with is too big&mdash;for any fine result to
+be possible. If we are ever to get out of children,
+and men and women, anything like the
+best of which they are capable, we shall have
+to have much smaller schools and much smaller
+communities. Some sort of beautiful and useful
+corporate life is possible in a place the size of
+Bedford; it is not possible in a place the size
+of London. Ten or twenty children in a class
+can be treated as individual human beings, and
+the best that is in them drawn out by a sympathetic
+understanding of personal traits and
+characteristics. But a class of seventy or eighty
+must be treated as a machine of which the little
+live units are but wheels and cogs. It can, as
+a machine, be made to do certain things;
+the component parts of it can be made to
+contribute their share to the general result,
+even as the bright and helpless parts of a
+machine contribute to its activity. But you
+can never get out of the children composing
+such a class anything approaching the fine
+result which can be achieved by an education
+based on the broad lines of what is good for
+<i>children</i>, with a superstructure of delicate perception<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+of what is good for the <i>individual child</i>.
+Dick, Tom, and Harry can join in certain lessons
+and certain games, but there will always be some
+matters in which Dick is not in the least like
+Tom, and Harry is quite different from both the
+others.</p>
+
+<p>The people who govern us talk about education&mdash;they
+talk greatly, and a little they do.
+But they will not do the one simple, straightforward
+thing which is as essential to the growth
+of the mind as vital religion is to the growth of
+the soul. Any teacher in any elementary school
+knows what is needed, but those in power do not
+know it. They will make scholarships as plentiful
+as blackberries, they will do all sorts of fine
+things for secondary education. The one thing
+they will not do is to <i>reduce the size of the classes</i>
+in elementary schools. And so long as this is not
+done the millions we spend yearly on education
+are, to a pitiably great extent, millions wasted.
+We might almost as well take at least half the
+money, put it in bags, tie it up with red tape,
+and drop it over London Bridge, or, still better,
+spend the money in monthly exhibitions of
+free fireworks, which would at least give the
+children and the grown-ups one jolly evening in
+thirty.</p>
+
+<p>A small class can be taught, and taught well,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+by a teacher of as average ability as ever
+tumbled head over heels from London to
+York, but a large class your average teacher
+will never get at at all. It takes a genius and
+an orator to speak intelligibly to more than
+fifteen people. I sometimes wonder if teachers
+know how much of their teaching their scholars
+miss altogether&mdash;fail to see, fail to grasp, do
+not know is there. Between the careless or
+overworked teacher and the timid and rather
+stupid child there is a great gulf fixed. To
+such a child the voice of the teacher is the voice
+of one crying in the wilderness, crying quite
+aimlessly, in a wilderness of unintelligible
+jargon. Many boys&mdash;in public as well as elementary
+schools by the way&mdash;go through
+their whole school life "scraping through somehow,"
+and never once having a clear idea of
+anything that they are doing, hardly ever a
+glimpse of what anything is about or that anything
+has any reasonable relation to anything
+else. It is rather like a miracle, whichever way
+you take it, but there it is, and a miracle which
+might be made impossible and unnecessary by
+a little sensible commonplace legislation. We
+want smaller classes, and we want those classes
+better taught. That is to say, we want more
+teachers, and better-paid teachers; we want<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+our teachers to be placed in a position of certain
+comfort, that they shall not be living in the
+House of Poverty with the wolf of Worry always
+nosing round the door, distracting their attention
+from what should be their chief thought&mdash;for
+most of the months of the year. We
+want longer holidays, and a better provision
+for happiness in those holidays, both for teachers
+and children. We want every teacher and
+every child to have a real holiday, not merely
+an absence from school. In a word, we want
+more money spent on schools and less on gaols
+and reformatories. It cannot be put too plainly
+that the nation which will not pay for her
+schools must pay for her prisons and asylums.
+People don't seem to mind so much paying for
+prisons and workhouses. What they really hate
+seems to be paying for schools. And yet how
+well, in the end, such spending would pay us!
+"There is no darkness but ignorance," and we
+have now such a chance as has never been the
+lot of men since Time began, a chance to light
+enough lamps to dispel that darkness. If only
+we would take that chance! Even from the
+meanest point of view we ought to take it.
+It would be cheaper in the end. Schools are
+cheaper than prisons.</p>
+
+<p>Now that I have written the words I don't<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+like the look of them; and looking back through
+this book, I see that most of what I have written
+applies to the kind of children who are in little
+danger of going to prison, children in comfortable
+homes, with enough of, at any rate, material
+well-being. Most of my book refers to the class
+that is not taught in Council Schools, and that
+will not be sent to a reformatory if the eighth
+commandment is not learnt in one lesson. This
+class is called the upper middle-class, and it
+does not go to the Council Schools because it
+has money to go elsewhere. The children of
+this class are, in brain and heart, not superior
+to the children of what are called the working
+classes. Place the middle-class children in the
+surroundings of the slum child, and thereupon
+the middle-class child would grow as the slum
+child grows, as the plant debarred from light
+grows&mdash;<i>not straight</i>. What we want is that
+there should be a distribution of wealth so
+changed from the one that now destroys the
+nation's balance as to put every parent in a
+position to pay for his child's education, and
+that the nation's schools should be so superlatively
+better than all other schools that no
+parent would dream of sending his child to
+any school but that provided by the nation for
+the nation's children.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And now that it comes to good-bye, I am
+sorry to say it. I feel that I have only been
+touching the fringe of the greatest problem
+in the world: that there is very much which
+I have left unsaid, or which I might have said
+differently, and better. One might go on for
+all one's life thinking and writing about children
+and their needs, and always there would be
+more unsaid than said, less thought than food
+for thought. If the thoughts which I have
+striven to set forth give food for thought in
+others, if my little candle may help to kindle
+a great torch, I shall look back on the writing
+of this book as a great privilege and the
+memory of the hours spent on it I shall treasure
+with a glad and grateful heart.</p>
+
+
+<div class='copyright'><i>Printed by Hazell, Watson &amp; Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.</i></div>
+
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+<div class='tnote'>
+<p><b>Transcriber's Notes:</b> Varried hyphenation retained. Obvious punctuation errors repaired.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Wings and the Child
+       or, the Building of Magic Cities
+
+Author: E. [Edith] Nesbit
+
+Illustrator: George Barraud
+
+Release Date: February 25, 2012 [EBook #38977]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS AND THE CHILD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINGS AND THE CHILD
+
+
+
+
+WORKS BY E. NESBIT
+
+    CHILDREN'S BOOKS
+
+    THE MAGIC CITY
+    THE WONDERFUL GARDEN
+    THE MAGIC WORLD
+    THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
+    OSWALD BASTABLE
+    HARDING'S LUCK
+    THE TREASURE SEEKERS
+    THE WOULDBEGOODS
+    FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
+    THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET
+    THE AMULET
+    THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
+    NINE UNLIKELY TALES
+    THE HOUSE OF ARDEN
+    THE BOOK OF DRAGONS
+    WET MAGIC
+
+
+    FICTION
+
+    THE INCOMPLETE AMORIST
+    DAPHNE IN FITZROY STREET
+    THESE LITTLE ONES
+    MAN AND MAID
+    SALOME AND THE HEAD
+    THE RED HOUSE
+    DORMANT
+    THE LITERARY SENSE
+    IN HOMESPUN
+    FEAR
+
+
+    POETRY
+
+    LAYS AND LEGENDS. 1st Series
+    LAYS AND LEGENDS. 2nd Series
+    LEAVES OF LIFE
+    THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE
+    A POMANDER OF VERSE
+    BALLADS AND LYRICS
+    JESUS IN LONDON
+    BALLADS AND LYRICS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
+    NEW POEMS
+
+[Illustration: _Photo David Norris_
+
+E. Nesbit
+
+[_Frontispiece._]
+
+
+
+
+    WINGS AND THE CHILD
+
+    OR
+
+    THE BUILDING OF MAGIC CITIES
+
+    BY
+
+    E. NESBIT
+
+    AUTHOR OF
+    "THE MAGIC CITY," "THE WOULDBEGOODS," ETC., ETC.
+
+    WITH PICTURES BY GEORGE BARRAUD AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
+
+    HODDER AND STOUGHTON
+    NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+
+
+
+_Printed in 1913_
+
+
+
+
+TO THE READER
+
+
+WHEN this book first came to my mind it came as a history and theory of
+the building of Magic Cities on tables, with bricks and toys and little
+things such as a child may find and use. But as I kept the thought by me
+it grew and changed, as thoughts will do, until at last it took shape as
+an attempt to contribute something, however small and unworthy, to the
+science of building a magic city in the soul of a child, a city built of
+all things pure and fine and beautiful. As you read, it will, I hope,
+seem to you that something of what I say is true--in much, no doubt, it
+will seem to you that I am mistaken; but however you may disagree with
+me, you will, I trust, at least have faith in the honesty of my purpose.
+If I seem to you to be too dogmatic, to lay down the law too much as
+though I were the teacher and you the learner, I beg you to believe that
+it is in no such spirit that I have written. Rather it is as though you
+and I, spending a quiet evening by your fire, talked together of the
+things that matter, and as though I laid before you all the things that
+were in my heart--not stopping at every turn to say "Do you not think so
+too?" and "I hope you agree with me?" but telling you, straight from the
+heart, what I have felt and thought and, I humbly say, known about
+children and the needs of children. I have talked to you as to a friend,
+without the reservations and apologies which we use with strangers. And
+if, in anything, I shall have offended you, I entreat you to extend to
+me the forgiveness and the forbearance which you would exercise towards
+a friend who had offended you, not meaning to offend, and to believe
+that I have spoken to you as frankly and plainly as I would wish you to
+speak to me, were you the writer and I the reader.
+
+                                                   E. NESBIT.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    _PART I_
+
+                                 PAGE
+    CHAPTER I
+    OF UNDERSTANDING                3
+
+    CHAPTER II
+    NEW WAYS                        9
+
+    CHAPTER III
+    PLAYTHINGS                     17
+
+    CHAPTER IV
+    IMAGINATION                    24
+
+    CHAPTER V
+    OF TAKING ROOT                 33
+
+    CHAPTER VI
+    BEAUTY AND KNOWLEDGE           42
+
+    CHAPTER VII
+    OF BUILDING AND OTHER MATTERS  54
+
+    CHAPTER VIII
+    THE MORAL CODE                 67
+
+    CHAPTER IX
+    PRAISE AND PUNISHMENT          82
+
+    CHAPTER X
+    THE ONE THING NEEDFUL          94
+
+
+    _PART II_
+
+    CHAPTER I
+    ROMANCE IN GAMES              107
+
+    CHAPTER II
+    BUILDING CITIES               118
+
+    CHAPTER III
+    BRICKS--AND OTHER THINGS      130
+
+    CHAPTER IV
+    THE MAGIC CITY                143
+
+    CHAPTER V
+    MATERIALS                     156
+
+    CHAPTER VI
+    COLLECTIONS                   165
+
+    CHAPTER VII
+    THE POOR CHILD'S CITY         177
+
+    CHAPTER VIII
+    THE END                       190
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+    PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR      _Frontispiece_
+
+                                      PAGE
+
+    THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE              8
+
+    NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE      13
+
+    HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE           18
+
+    THE TOMB IN THE DESERT              18
+
+    STONEHENGE                          22
+
+    THE TREE LIKE A MAN                 27
+
+    POPPY DOLL                          29
+
+    DOVES AND DRAGON                    30
+
+    THE ASTROLOGER'S TOWER              32
+
+    THE SILVER TOWERS                   34
+
+    FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH              35
+
+    THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE                40
+
+    THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED           47
+
+    A CHINESE TEMPLE                    52
+
+    THE SQUARE TOWER                    56
+
+    SHELL ARCHES                        57
+
+    HANDKERCHIEF TENTS                  65
+
+    ONE HALF OF THE CITY                72
+
+    THE TAIL OF PUSS                    78
+
+    THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY          82
+
+    THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT           96
+
+    OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES           97
+
+    THE PALACE OF CATS                 120
+
+    GUARDED ARCH                       123
+
+    BOXES                              135
+
+    ARCHES AND PILLARS                 140
+
+    PILLARED COURT                     141
+
+    MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM       148
+
+    THE GUARD-ROOM                     149
+
+    THE DOMINO DOOR                    150
+
+    LARCH PALM                         152
+
+    THE MAGIC CITY                     152
+
+    HONESTY PILLARS                    159
+
+    TREES                              166
+
+    THICK ARCHES                       168
+
+    FAN WINDOW                         169
+
+    THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE                171
+
+    HONESTY ROOF                       174
+
+    CLOTHES PEGS                       181
+
+    TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE        185
+
+    COTTON REELS                       186
+
+    LATTICE WINDOWS                    187
+
+
+
+
+_PART I_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Of Understanding
+
+
+IT is not with any pretension to special knowledge of my subject that I
+set out to write down what I know about children. I have no special
+means of knowing anything: I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be
+known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.
+And by experience I do not mean scientific experience, that is the
+recorded results of experiments, the tabulated knowledge wrung from
+observation; I mean personal experience, that is to say, memory. You may
+observe the actions of children and chronicle their sayings, and produce
+from these, perhaps, a lifelike sketch of a child, as it appears to the
+grown-up observer; but observation is no key to the inner mysteries of a
+child's soul. The only key to those mysteries is in knowledge, the
+knowledge of what you yourself felt when you were good and little and a
+child. You can remember how things looked to you, and how things looked
+to the other children who were your intimates. Our own childhood,
+besides furnishing us with an exhaustless store of enlightening
+memories, furnishes us with the one opportunity of our lives for the
+observation of children--other children. There is a freemasonry between
+children, a spontaneous confidence and give-and-take which is and must
+be for ever impossible between children and grown-ups, no matter how
+sympathetic the grown-up, how confiding the child. Between the child and
+the grown-up there is a great gulf fixed--and this gulf, the gulf
+between one generation and another, can never be really bridged. You may
+learn to see across it, a little, or sometimes in rare cases to lean
+very far across it so that you can just touch the tips of the little
+fingers held out from the other side. But if your dealings with those on
+the other side of the gulf are to be just, generous, noble, and helpful,
+they must be motived and coloured by your memories of the time when you
+yourself were on the other side--when you were a child full of your own
+hopes, dreams, aims, interests, instincts, and imaginings, and over
+against you, kindly perhaps, tenderly loving, often tenderly loved, but
+still in some mysterious way antagonistic and counting as "Them," were
+the grown-ups. I might say elders, parents, teachers, spiritual pastors
+and masters, but the word which the child himself uses seems to me, for
+all reasons, to be the best word for my use, because it expresses fully
+and finally the nature of the gulf between. The grown-ups are the people
+who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a
+child. And Time marks with the same outward brand those who have
+forgotten and those who do not forget. So that even the few who have
+managed to slip past the Customs-house with their bundle of memories
+intact can never fully display them. These are a sort of contraband, and
+neither the children nor the grown-ups will ever believe that that which
+we have brought with us from the land of childhood is genuine. The
+grown-ups accuse us of invention, sometimes praise us for it, when all
+we have is memory; and the children imagine that we must have been
+watching them, and thus surprised a few of their secrets, when all that
+we have is the secrets which were our own when we were children--secrets
+which were so bound up with the fibre of our nature that we could never
+lose them, and so go through life with them, our dearest treasures. Such
+people feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world. For
+a middle-aged gentleman with a beard or a stout elderly lady with
+spectacles to move among other elderly and spectacled persons feeling
+that they are still children, and that the other elderly and spectacled
+ones are really grown-ups, seems thoroughly unreasonable, and therefore
+those who have never forgotten do not, as a rule, say anything about it.
+They just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any
+one--but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is
+like acting in a charade. Time with his make-up box of lines and
+wrinkles, his skilful brush that paints out the tints and the contours
+of youth, his supply of grey wigs and rounded shoulders and pillows for
+the waist, disguises the actors well enough, and they go through life
+altogether unsuspected. The tired eyes close on a world which to them
+has always been the child's world, the tired hands loose the earthly
+possessions which have, to them, been ever the toys of the child. And
+deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come
+it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
+
+Such people as these are never pessimists, though they may be sinners;
+and they will be trusting, to the verge of what a real grown-up would
+call imbecility. To them the world will be, from first to last, a
+beautiful place, and every unbeautiful thing will be a surprise, hurting
+them like a sudden blow. They will never learn prudence, or parsimony,
+nor know, with the unerring instinct of the really grown-up, the things
+that are or are not done by the best people. All their lives they will
+love, and expect love--and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not
+get it. They will expect beautiful quixotic impulsive generosities and
+splendours from a grown-up world which has forgotten what impulse was:
+and to the very end they will not leave off expecting. They will be
+easily pleased and easily hurt, and the grown-ups in grain will
+contemplate their pains and their pleasures with an uncomprehending
+irritation.
+
+If these children, disguised by grown-up bodies, are ever recognised for
+what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their
+pens--when they write for and about children. Then grown-up people will
+call them intelligent and observant, and children will write to them and
+ask the heart-warm, heart-warming question, "How did you know?" For if
+they can become articulate they will speak the language that children
+understand, and children will love, not them, for their identity is
+cloaked with grey grown-up-ness, but what they say. There are some of
+these in whom the fire of genius burns up and licks away the trappings
+under which Time seeks to disguise them--Andersen, Stevenson, Juliana
+Ewing were such as these--and the world knows them for what they were,
+and adores in them what in the uninspired it would decry and despise.
+
+To these others who have the memories of childhood untainted and yet
+have not the gift and relief of words, to these I address myself in the
+first instance, because they will understand without any involved
+explanation on my part what it is that I am driving at, and it is these
+who, alone, can teach the real grown-ups the things which they have
+forgotten. For these things can be taught, these things can be
+re-learned. I would have every man and woman in whom the heart of
+childhood still lives, protest, however feebly and haltingly, yet with
+all the power of the heart, against machine-made education--against the
+instruction which crams a child with facts and starves it of dreams,
+which forces the free foot into heavy boots and bids it walk on narrow
+pavement, which crushes with heavy hand the wings of the soul, and
+presses the flower of imagination flat between the pages of a lexicon.
+
+[Illustration: THE KING'S SUMMER-HOUSE.
+
+8]]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+New Ways
+
+
+"WHAT," we ask with anxious gravity, "what is the best sort of teaching
+for children?" One might as sanely ask what is the best sort of
+spectacles for men, or the best size in gloves for women. And the blind
+coarse generalisation which underlies that question is the very heart
+and core of the muddled, musty maze we call education. We talk of the
+best sort of education for children, as we might talk of the best sort
+of polish for stoves, the best sort of nourishment for mice. Stoves are
+all alike, they vary in ugliness perhaps, but the iron soul of one is as
+the iron soul of the other. The polish that is good for one is good for
+all. Mice may, and do, vary in size and colour; their mousehood does not
+vary, nor their taste for cheese. In the inner nature, in the soul and
+self of it, each child is different from any other child, and the
+education that treats children as a class and not as individual human
+beings is the education whose failure is bringing our civilisation
+about our ears even as we speak.
+
+Each child is an explorer in a new country--an explorer with its own
+special needs and curiosities. We put up iron railings to keep the
+explorers to our own sordidly asphalted paths. The little free wild
+creatures would seek their meat from God: we round them into herds, pen
+them in folds, and feed them with artificial foods--drab flat oil cakes
+all alike, not considering that for some brown nuts and red berries, and
+for some the new clean green grass, may be the bread of life.
+
+Or, if you take the mind of a child to be a garden wherein flowers grow
+that might be trained to beauty, you bring along your steam-roller, and
+crush everything to a flat field where you may grow cabbages. It is so
+good for the field, you say--because you like cabbages.
+
+Liberty is one of the rights we claim for ourselves, though God knows we
+get little enough of it and use still less; and Liberty is one of the
+rights that a child above all needs--every possible liberty, of thought,
+of word, of deed. The old systems of education seem to have found it
+good to coerce a child for the simple sake of coercion--to make it do
+what the master chose, to make it leave undone those things which it
+wished to do and to do those things which it did not wish to do--nay,
+more, wished violently and conclusively not to do. To force the choice
+of the teacher on the child, to override the timid natural impulses of
+the child with the hard hoofs of the teacher's individuality, to crush
+out all initiative, to force the young supple mind into a mould, to lop
+the budding branches, nip off the sensitive seeking tendrils, to batter
+down the child's will by the brute force of the grown-up will, to "break
+the child's spirit," as the cursed phrase used to run--this was, in
+effect, what education meant. There was a picture in _Punch_, I
+remember--at least I have forgotten the picture, but I remember the
+legend: "Cissy, go and see what Bobbie's doing, and tell him not to."
+
+It did not much matter what you made a child do, so long as it was
+something against the grain. He was to learn, not what he with his
+wonderful new curiosities and aptitudes longed to learn, but what you
+wished to teach; you with your dulled senses--dulled in the same bitter
+school as that in which he was now a sad learner.
+
+[Illustration: NOT MUCH HIGHER THAN THE TABLE.]
+
+Generation after generation has gone on, pounding away at the old silly
+game, each generation anxious and eager to hurt the new one as it, in
+its time, was hurt. Each generation must, one would have thought, have
+remembered what things hurt children and how much these things hurt, and
+yet this intolerable cycle of bullying and punishment and repression
+went on and on and on. Children were bullied and broken--and grew up to
+bully and break in their turn. It must be that this was because the
+grown-ups did not remember. Those who have the care of children, who
+work for them, who teach them, should be those who do remember: those
+who have not forgotten what it feels like to be a child--any sort of
+child. For, though children are all different, there is a common measure
+among them as there is among men. A law for men cannot be good if it be
+made--as indeed but too often happens--by those who have forgotten what
+it used to feel like to be a man; and what sort of poetry do you get
+from one who has forgotten beauty and sorrow, and the Spring, and how it
+feels to be young and a lover? And if the people who have the care of
+children have forgotten what it feels like to be a child, those who do
+remember should remind them. They should be reminded how it feels to be
+not so very much higher than the table, how it feels not to be so clever
+as you are now, and so much more interested in so much more--how it
+feels to believe in things and in people as you did when you were new to
+the journey of life--to explore every road you came to, to trust every
+person you met. It is a long time ago, but can you not remember the days
+when right and wrong were as different as milk and mud, when you knew
+that it was really wrong to be naughty and really good to be good, when
+you felt that your mother could do no wrong and that your father was the
+noblest and bravest of men? Do you remember the world of small and new
+and joyous and delightful things? Try to remember it if you would know
+how to help a child instead of hindering it--try to look at the world
+with the clear, clean eyes that once were yours in the days when you had
+never read a newspaper or deceived a friend. You will then be able to
+see again certain ideals, unclouded and radiant, which the dust of the
+crowded highway and the smears of getting-on have dimmed and
+distorted--quite simple ideals of love, faith, unselfishness, honour,
+truth. I know these words are often enough on the lips of all of us, but
+a child's ear will be able to tell whether the words spring from the
+lips or the heart. Look back, and you will see that you yourself were
+also able to distinguish these things--once.
+
+Education as it should be, the unfolding of a flower, not the distorting
+of it, is only possible to those who are willing and able themselves to
+become as little children.
+
+It is because certain great spirits have done this and have tried to
+teach others to do it, that reforms in education have begun to be at
+least possible. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Signora Montessori and many a
+lesser star has shone upon a new path. And public interest has centred
+more and more on the welfare of the child. Books are written, societies
+formed, newspapers founded in the interests of the child, and true
+education becomes a possibility.
+
+And well indeed it is for us that this is so. For the education of the
+last three hundred years has led, in all things vital and spiritual,
+downhill all the way. We have gone on frustrating natural human
+intelligences and emotions, inculcating false doctrines, and choking
+with incoherent facts the souls which asked to be fed with
+dreams-come-true--till now our civilisation is a thing we cannot look at
+without a mental and moral nausea. We have, in our countrysides,
+peasants too broken for rebellion, in our cities.
+
+    The mortal sickness of a mind
+    Too unhappy to be kind.
+
+If ever we are to be able to look ourselves and each other in the face
+again it will be because a new generation has arisen in whose ears the
+voice of God and His angels has not ceased to sound. If only we would
+see the things that belong to our peace, and lead the children instead
+of driving them, who knows what splendid thoughts and actions they in
+their natural development might bring to the salvation of the world?
+
+In the Palace of Education which the great minds have designed and are
+designing, many stones will be needed--and so I bring the little stone I
+have hewn out and tried to shape, in the hope that it may fit into a
+corner of that great edifice. For if anything is to be done, it is
+necessary that all who have anything to give, shall give it. As Francis
+Bacon said:
+
+"Nothing can so much conduce to the drawing down, as it were, from
+heaven a whole shower of new and profitable Inventions, as this, that
+the experiments of many . . . may come to the knowledge of one man, or
+some few, who by mutual conference may whet and sharpen one another, so
+that by this . . . Arts may flourish, and as it were by a commixture and
+communication of Rays, inflame one another. . . . This sagacity by
+literate experience may in the mean project and scatter for the benefit
+of man many rudiments to knowledge which may be had at hand."
+
+And that is why I have left for a little while the telling of stories
+and set myself to write down something of what I know about
+children--know by the grace of memory and by the dreams of childhood, to
+me, thank God, persistent and imperishable.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Playthings
+
+
+THE prime instinct of a child at play--I do not mean a child at
+games--is to create. I use the word confidently. He will make as well as
+create, if you let him, but always he will create: he will use the whole
+force of dream and fancy to create something out of nothing--over and
+beyond what he will make out of such materials as he has to hand. The
+five-year-old will lay a dozen wooden bricks and four cotton reels
+together, set a broken cup on the top of them, and tell you it is a
+steam-engine. And it is. He has created the engine which he sees, and
+you don't see, and the pile of bricks and cotton reels is the symbol of
+his creation. He will silently borrow your best scissors and cut a
+serrated band of newspaper, which he will fasten round his head (with
+your best brooch, if he cannot find a pin), hang another newspaper from
+his shoulders, and sit in state holding the hearth-brush. He will tell
+you that he is a king--and he is. He has created crown, robes, sceptre,
+and kingship. The paper and the rest of it are but symbols.
+
+[Illustration: HE HAS CREATED THE ENGINE.]
+
+And you shall observe that the toys which the child loves best are
+always those toys which lend themselves to such symbolic use.
+
+[Illustration: THE TOMB IN THE DESERT.
+
+18]]
+
+Christmas is at hand. You go to buy gifts for the child, in memory of
+that Other Child whose birthday gifts were gold, frankincense, and
+myrrh. You go into the toyshops, elbowing your way as best you can,
+looking for such toys as may aid the child in his work of creative
+imagination.
+
+You find a vast mass and litter and jumble of incredible
+futilities--things made to sell, things made by people who have
+forgotten what it is like to be a child. Mechanical toys of all sorts,
+stupid toys, toys that will only do one thing, and that thing vulgar and
+foolish. And, worst outrage of all, ugly toys, monstrosities,
+deformities, lead devils, grinning humpbacked clowns, "comic" dogs and
+cats, hideous mis-shapen pigs, incredible negroes, intolerable
+golliwogs. All such things the natural child, with a child's decent
+detestation of deformity, will thrust from it with screams of fear and
+hatred, till the materialistic mother or nurse explains that the horror
+is not really, as the child knows it to be, horrible and unnatural, but
+"funny." Thus do we outrage the child's inborn sense of beauty, which is
+also the sense of health and fitness, and teach it that deformity is not
+shocking, not pitiable even, but just "funny." All these ugly toys are
+impossible as aids to clean imagination.
+
+So, almost in as great, though not in so harmful a degree, is the
+"character doll." The old doll was a doll, and not a character.
+Therefore she could assume any character at your choice. The character
+doll is Baby Willy, and can never be anything else, unless imagination,
+exasperated and baffled, christens him Silly Billy in the moment of
+furious projection across the nursery floor. But the old doll, with her
+good, expressionless face and clear blue eyes, could be a duchess or a
+dairymaid, a captive princess or a greengrocer's wife keeping shop, a
+cruel stepmother or Joan of Arc. I beg you to try Baby Willy in the
+character of Joan of Arc.
+
+You cannot hope to understand children by common-sense, by reason, by
+logic, nor by any science whatsoever. You cannot understand them by
+imagination--not even by love itself. There is only one way: to remember
+what you thought and felt and liked and hated when you yourself were a
+child. Not what you know now--or think you know--you ought to have
+thought and liked, but what you did then, in stark fact, like and think.
+There is no other way.
+
+Do you remember the toys you liked, the toys you played with? Do you
+remember the toys you hated--after the fading of the first day's flush
+of novelty, of possession? The houses with doors that wouldn't open? The
+stables with horses that wouldn't stand up? The shops whose goods were
+part of their painted shelves, whose shopmen were as fast glued behind
+the counter as any live shop-assistant before the passing of the Shops
+Act?
+
+And the mechanical toys--the clockwork toys. The engine was all right,
+even after the clockwork ran down for the last time with that inexorable
+whizz which told you all was over; you could build tunnels with the big
+brown books in the library and push the engine through with your
+hand--it would run quite a long way out on the other side. But the other
+clockwork things! How can one love and pet a mouse, no matter how furry
+its superficial exterior, when underneath, where its soft waistcoat and
+its little feet should be, there is only a hard surface from which
+incompetent wheels protrude? And the ostrich who draws a hansom cab, and
+the man who beats the boy with a stick? When they have whizzed their
+last, who cares for the tin relics outliving their detestable
+activities?
+
+Think of the toys you liked: the Noah's Ark--full of characters. What
+stirring dramas of the chase, what sporting incidents, what domestic and
+agricultural operations could be carried out with that most royal of
+toys. Mr. Noah, I remember, was equally competent and convincing as
+ploughman or carter. But his chief role was Sitting Bull. His sons were
+inimitable as Chingachgook and scalp hunters generally. You cannot play
+scalp hunters with the mechanical ostrich indissolubly welded to a
+hansom cab.
+
+[Illustration: STONEHENGE.]
+
+You loved your bricks, I think, especially if you lived in the days when
+bricks were of well-seasoned oak, heavy, firm, exactly proportioned,
+before the boxes of inexact light deal bricks, with the one painted
+glass window, began to be made in Germany. How finely those great bricks
+stood for Stonehenge, and how submissively Anna, the Dutch doll, whose
+arms and legs were gone, played the part of the Sacrifice. If you
+remember those bricks you will remember the polished, white wooden dairy
+sets in oval white boxes--churns and tubs and kettles and pots all
+neatly and beautifully turned. You will remember the doll's house
+furniture, rosewood, duly mitred and dovetailed, fine cabinet-makers'
+work, little beautiful models of beautiful things. Now the dolls' house
+furniture is glued together. You can't trust a light-weight china doll
+to sit on the kitchen chairs. . . . But you can get your mechanical
+ostrich and your golliwog. . . .
+
+Children in towns are cut off, at least for most of the year, from the
+splendid and ever-varying possibilities of clay and mud and sand,
+oak-apples and snow-berries, acorn-cups and seaweed, shells and sticks
+and stones which serve and foster the creative instinct, the thousand
+adjuncts to that play which is dream and reality in one.
+
+For them, even more than for the happier country children, it is good to
+choose toys which shall possess, above and before all, the one supreme
+quality of a good toy. Let it be a toy that is not merely itself, like
+the ostrich of whom I hope you are now as weary as I, but a toy that can
+be, at need, other things. A toy, in fine, that your child can, in the
+fullest and most satisfying sense, play with.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Imagination
+
+
+TO the child, from the beginning, life is the unfolding of one vast
+mystery; to him our stalest commonplaces are great news, our dullest
+facts prismatic wonders. To the baby who has never seen a red ball, a
+red ball is a marvel, new and magnificent as ever the golden apples were
+to Hercules.
+
+You show the child many things, all strange, all entrancing; it sees, it
+hears, it touches; it learns to co-ordinate sight and touch and hearing.
+You tell it tales of the things it cannot see and hear and touch, of men
+"that it may never meet, of lands that it shall never see"; strange
+black and brown and yellow people whose dress is not the dress of mother
+or nurse--strange glowing yellow lands where the sun burns like fire,
+and flowers grow that are not like the flowers in the fields at home.
+You tell it that the stars, which look like pin-holes in the floor of
+heaven, are really great lonely worlds, millions of miles away; that
+the earth, which the child can see for itself to be flat, is really
+round; that nuts fall from the trees because of the force of
+gravitation, and not, as reason would suggest, merely because there is
+nothing to hold them up. And the child believes; it believes all the
+seeming miracles.
+
+Then you tell it of other things no more miraculous and no less; of
+fairies, and dragons, and enchantments, of spells and magic, of flying
+carpets and invisible swords. The child believes in these wonders
+likewise. Why not? If very big men live in Patagonia, why should not
+very little men live in flower-bells? If electricity can move unseen
+through the air, why not carpets? The child's memory becomes a
+store-house of beautiful and wonderful things which are or have been in
+the visible universe, or in that greater universe, the mind of man. Life
+will teach the child, soon enough, to distinguish between the two.
+
+But there are those who are not as you and I. These say that all the
+enchanting fairy romances are lies, that nothing is real that cannot be
+measured or weighed, seen or heard or handled. Such make their idols of
+stocks and stones, and are blind and deaf to the things of the spirit.
+These hard-fingered materialists crush the beautiful butterfly wings of
+imagination, insisting that pork and pews and public-houses are more
+real than poetry; that a looking-glass is more real than love, a viper
+than valour. These Gradgrinds give to the children the stones which they
+call facts, and deny to the little ones the daily bread of dreams.
+
+Of the immeasurable value of imagination as a means to the development
+of the loveliest virtues, to the uprooting of the ugliest and meanest
+sins, there is here no space to speak. But the gain in sheer happiness
+is more quickly set forth. Imagination, duly fostered and trained, is to
+the world of visible wonder and beauty what the inner light is to the
+Japanese lantern. It transfigures everything into a glory that is only
+not magic to us because we know Who kindled the inner light, Who set up
+for us the splendid lantern of this world.
+
+[Illustration: THE TREE LIKE A MAN.]
+
+But Mr. Gradgrind prefers the lantern unlighted. Material facts are good
+enough for him. Until it comes to religion. And then, suddenly, the
+child who has been forbidden to believe in Jack the Giant Killer must
+believe in Goliath and David. There are no fairies, but you must believe
+that there are angels. The magic sword and the magic buckler are
+nonsense, but the child must not have any doubts about the breastplate
+of righteousness and the sword of the Spirit. What spiritual reaction do
+you expect when, after denying all the symbolic stories and legends, you
+suddenly confront your poor little Materialist with the Most Wonderful
+Story in the world?
+
+If I had my way, children should be taught no facts unless they asked
+for them. Heaven knows they ask questions enough. They should just be
+taught the old wonder-stories, and learn their facts through these. Who
+wants to know about pumpkins until he has heard Cinderella? Why not tell
+the miracle of Jonah first, and let the child ask about the natural
+history of the whale afterwards, if he cares to hear it?
+
+And one of the greatest helps to a small, inexperienced traveller in
+this sometimes dusty way is the likeness of things to each other. Your
+piece of thick bread and butter is a little stale, perhaps, and bores
+you; but, when you see that your first three bites have shaped it to the
+likeness of a bear or a beaver, dull teatime becomes interesting at
+once. A cloud that is like a face, a tree that is like an old man, a
+hill that is like an elephant's back, if you have things like these to
+look at, and look out for, how short the long walk becomes.
+
+[Illustration: POPPY DOLL.]
+
+And in the garden, when the columbine is a circle of doves, with spread
+wings and beaks that touch, when the foxglove flower is a little Puck's
+hat which will fit on your finger, when the snapdragon is not just a
+snapdragon, but a dragon that will snap, and the poppies can be made
+into dolls with black woolly hair and grass sashes--how the enchantment
+of the garden grows. The child will be all the more ready to hear about
+the seed vessels of the columbine when he has seen the doves, and the
+pollen of the poppy will have a double interest for her who has played
+with the woolly-haired dolls. Imagination gives to the child a world
+transfigured; let us leave it that radiant mystery for the little time
+that is granted.
+
+[Illustration: DOVES AND DRAGON.]
+
+I know a child whose parents are sad because she does not love
+arithmetic and history, but rather the beautiful dreams which the
+Gradgrinds call nonsense. Here are the verses I wrote for that child:
+
+FOR DOLLY
+
+WHO DOES NOT LEARN HER LESSONS
+
+    You see the fairies dancing in the fountain,
+      Laughing, leaping, sparkling with the spray.
+    You see the gnomes, at work beneath the mountain,
+      Make gold and silver and diamonds every day.
+    You see the angels, sliding down the moonbeams,
+      Bring white dreams, like sheaves of lilies fair.
+    You see the imps scarce seen against the noonbeams,
+      Rise from the bonfire's blue and liquid air.
+
+    All the enchantment, all the magic there is
+      Hid in trees and blossoms, to you is plain and true.
+    Dewdrops in lupin leaves are jewels for the fairies;
+      Every flower that blows is a miracle for you.
+    Air, earth, water, fire, spread their splendid wares for you.
+      Millions of magics beseech your little looks;
+    Every soul your winged soul meets, loves you and cares for you.
+      Ah! why must we clip those wings and dim those eyes with books?
+
+    Soon, soon enough, the magic lights grow dimmer,
+      Marsh mists arise to veil the radiant sky.
+    Dust of hard highways will veil the starry glimmer;
+      Tired hands will lay the folded magic by.
+    Storm winds will blow through those enchanted closes,
+      Fairies be crushed where weed and briar grow strong. . . .
+    Leave her her crown of magic stars and roses,
+      Leave her her kingdom--she will not keep it long!
+
+[Illustration: THE ASTROLOGER'S TOWER.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Of Taking Root
+
+
+WHEN the history of our time comes to be written, it may be that the
+historian, remarking our many faults and weaknesses, and seeking to find
+a reason for them, speculating on our civilisation as we now speculate
+on the civilisations of Rome and Egypt, will come to see that the poor
+blossoms of civic virtue which we put forth owe their meagreness and
+deformity to the fact that our lives are no longer permitted to take
+root in material possessions. Material possessions indeed we have--too
+much of them and too many of them--but they are rather a dust that
+overlays the leaves of life than a soil in which the roots of life can
+grow.
+
+A certain solidness of character, a certain quiet force and confidence
+grow up naturally in the man who lives all his life in one house, grows
+all the flowers of his life in one garden. To plant a tree and know that
+if you live and tend it, you will gather fruit from it; that if you set
+out a thorn-hedge, it will be a fine thing when your little son has
+grown to be a man--these are pleasures which none but the very rich can
+now know. (And the rich who might enjoy these pleasures prefer to run
+about the country in motor cars.) That is why, for ordinary people, the
+word "neighbour" is ceasing to have any meaning. The man who occupies
+the villa partially detached from your own is not your neighbour. He
+only moved in a month or so ago, and you yourself will probably not be
+there next year. A house now is a thing to live in, not to love; and a
+neighbour a person to criticise, but not to befriend.
+
+[Illustration: THE SILVER TOWERS.]
+
+When people's lives were rooted in their houses and their gardens they
+were also rooted in their other possessions. And these possessions were
+thoughtfully chosen and carefully tended. You bought furniture to live
+with, and for your children to live with after you. You became familiar
+with it--it was adorned with memories, brightened with hopes; it, like
+your house and your garden, assumed then a warm friendliness of intimate
+individuality. In those days if you wanted to be smart, you bought a new
+carpet and curtains: now you "refurnish the drawing-room." If you have
+to move house, as you often do, it seems cheaper to sell most of your
+furniture and buy other, than it is to remove it, especially if the
+moving is caused by a rise of fortune.
+
+[Illustration: FURNITURE TO LIVE WITH.]
+
+I do not attempt to explain it, but there is a certain quality in men
+who have taken root, who have lived with the same furniture, the same
+house, the same friends for many years, which you shall look for in
+vain in men who have travelled the world over and met hundreds of
+acquaintances. For you do not know a man by meeting him at an hotel, any
+more than you know a house by calling at it, or know a garden by walking
+along its paths. The knowledge of human nature of the man who has taken
+root may be narrow, but it will be deep. The unrooted man who lives in
+hotels and changes his familiars with his houses, will have a shallow
+familiarity with the veneer of acquaintances; he will not have learned
+to weigh and balance the inner worth of a friend.
+
+In the same way I take it that a constant succession of new clothes is
+irritating and unsettling, especially to women. It fritters away the
+attention and exacerbates their natural frivolity. In other days when
+clothes were expensive, women bought few clothes, but those clothes were
+meant to last, and they did last. A silk dress often outlived the
+natural life of its first wearer. The knowledge that the question of
+dress will not be one to be almost weekly settled tends to calm the
+nerves and consolidate the character. Clothes are very cheap
+now--therefore women buy many new dresses, and throw the shoddy things
+away when, as they soon do, they grow shabby. Men are far more
+sensible. Every man knows the appeal of an old coat. So long as women
+are insensible to the appeal of an old gown, they need never hope to be
+considered, in stability of character, the equals of men.
+
+The passion for ornaments--not ornament--is another of the unsettling
+factors in an unsettling age. The very existence of the "fancy shop" is
+not only a menace to, but an attack on the quiet dignity in the home.
+The hundreds of ugly, twisted, bizarre fancy articles which replace the
+old few serious "ornaments" are all so many tokens of the spirit of
+unrest which is born of, and in turn bears, our modern civilisation.
+
+It is not, alas! presently possible for us as a nation to return to that
+calmer, more dignified state when the lives of men were rooted in their
+individual possessions, possessions adorned with memories of the past
+and cherished as legacies to the future. But I wish I could persuade
+women to buy good gowns and grow fond of them, to buy good chairs and
+tables, and to refrain from the orgy of the fancy shop. So much of life,
+of thought, of energy, of temper is taken up with the continual change
+of dress, house, furniture, ornaments, such a constant twittering of
+nerves goes on about all these things which do not matter. And the
+children, seeing their mother's gnat-like restlessness, themselves, in
+turn, seek change, not of ideas or of adjustments, but of possessions.
+Consider the acres of rubbish specially designed for children and spread
+out over the counters of countless toy-shops. Trivial, unsatisfying
+things, the fruit of a perverse and intense commercial ingenuity: things
+made to sell, and not to use.
+
+When the child's birthday comes, relations send him presents--give him
+presents, and his nursery is littered with a fresh array of undesirable
+imbecilities--to make way for which the last harvest of the same empty
+husks is thrust aside in the bottom of the toy cupboard. And in a couple
+of days most of the flimsy stuff is broken, and the child is weary to
+death of it all. If he has any real toys, he will leave the glittering
+trash for nurse to put away and go back to those real toys.
+
+When I was a child in the nursery we had--there were three of us--a
+large rocking horse, a large doll's house (with a wooden box as annexe),
+a Noah's Ark, dinner and tea things, a great chest of oak bricks, and a
+pestle and mortar. I cannot remember any other toys that pleased us.
+Dolls came and went, but they were not toys, they were characters, and
+now and then something of a clockwork nature strayed our way--to be
+broken up and disembowelled to meet the mechanical needs of the moment.
+I remember a desperate hour when I found that the walking doll from
+Paris had clockwork under her crinoline, and could not be comfortably
+taken to bed. I had a black-and-white china rabbit who was hard enough,
+in all conscience, but then he never pretended to be anything but a
+china rabbit, and I bought him with my own penny at Sandhurst Fair. He
+slept with me for seven or eight years, and when he was lost, with my
+play-box and the rest of its loved contents, on the journey from France
+to England, all the dignity of my thirteen years could not uphold me in
+that tragedy.
+
+It is a mistake to suppose that children are naturally fond of change.
+They love what they know. In strange places they suffer violently from
+home-sickness, even when their loved nurse or mother is with them. They
+want to get back to the house they know, the toys they know, the books
+they know. And the loves of children for their toys, especially the ones
+they take to bed with them, should be scrupulously respected. Children
+nowadays have insanitary, dusty Teddy Bears. I had a "rag doll," but
+she was stuffed with hair, and was washed once a fortnight, after which
+nurse put in her features again with a quill pen, and consoled me for
+any change in her expression by explaining that she was "growing up." My
+little son had a soap-stone mouse, and has it still.
+
+The fewer toys a child has the more he will value them; and it is
+important that a child should value his toys if he is to begin to get
+out of them their _full_ value. If his choice of objects be limited, he
+will use his imagination and ingenuity in making the objects available
+serve the purposes of such plays as he has in hand. Also it is well to
+remember that the supplementing of a child's own toys by other things,
+_lent for a time_, has considerable educational value. The child will
+learn quite easily that the difference between his and yours is not a
+difference between the attainable and the unattainable, but between the
+constant possession and the occasional possession. He will also learn to
+take care of the things which are lent to him, and, if he sees that you
+respect his possessions, will respect yours all the more in that some of
+them are, now and then, for a time and in a sense, his.
+
+[Illustration: THE TURQUOISE TEMPLE.]
+
+40]
+
+The generosity of aunts, uncles, and relations generally should be
+kindly but firmly turned into useful channels. The purchase of "fancy"
+things should be sternly discouraged.
+
+With the rocking horse, the bricks, the doll's house, the cart or
+wheel-barrow, the tea and dinner set, the Noah's Ark and the puzzle
+maps, the nursery will be rudimentarily equipped. The supplementary
+equipment can be added as it is needed, not by the sporadic outbursts of
+unclish extravagance, but by well-considered and slow degrees, and by
+means in which the child participates. For we must never forget that the
+child loves, both in imagination and in fact, to create. All his dreams,
+his innocent pretendings and make-believes, will help his nature to
+unfold, and his hands in their clumsy efforts will help the dreams,
+which in turn will help the little hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Beauty and Knowledge
+
+
+CLEVER young people find it amusing to sneer at the old-fashioned ideal
+of combining instruction with amusement--a stupid Victorian ideal, we
+are told, which a progressive generation has cast aside. Too hastily,
+perhaps--too inconsiderately. "Work while you work and play while you
+play" is a motto dealing with a big question, and one to which there are
+at least two sides. Entirely to divorce amusement and instruction--may
+not this tend to make the one dull and the other silly? In this, as in
+some other matters, our generation might well learn a little from its
+ancestors. In many ways no doubt we have far surpassed the simple ideals
+of our forefathers, but in the matter of amusements, in the matter of
+beauty, in the matter of teaching children things without boring them,
+or giving powders really and truly concealed in jam--have we advanced so
+much?
+
+To begin with, the world is much uglier than it was. At least England
+is, and France, and Belgium, and Italy, and I do not suppose that
+Germany, so far ahead of us with airships, is far behind in the ugliness
+which seems to be, with the airship, the hall-mark of a really advanced
+nation.
+
+We are proud, and justly, of the enormous advances made in the last
+sixty years in education, sanitation, and all the complicated and heavy
+machinery of the other 'ations, the 'ologies, and the 'isms; but in
+these other matters how is it with us? We have grown uglier, and the
+things which amuse no longer teach.
+
+For a good many years now--more than three hundred--old men have said
+"Such things and such were better in our time." And always the young
+have disbelieved the saying, which in due course came from their own
+lips. Has it ever occurred to any one that the reason why old people say
+this is quite the simplest of all reasons? They say it because it is
+_true_, and true in our land in quite a special manner. The chariot
+wheels of advancing civilisation must always furrow some green fields,
+grind some fair flowers in the dust. But the chariot wheels in which
+civilisation to-day advances grows less and less like a chariot and more
+and more like a steam-roller, and unless we steer better there will
+very soon be few flowers left to us.
+
+Those of us who have reached middle age already see that the old men
+spoke truly. Things are not what they were. Without dealing with frauds
+and adulterations and shoddy of all sorts we can see that things are not
+so good as they were, nor yet so beautiful.
+
+And I do not think that this means just that we are growing old, and
+that the fingers of Time have rubbed the bloom from the fruit of Life.
+Because those things which must be now as they used to be, trees,
+leaves, rivers, and the laughter of little children, flowers, the sea at
+those points where piers are impracticable, and mountains--the ones
+stony and steep enough to resist the jerry-builder and the funicular
+railway--still hold all, and more than all, their old magic and delight.
+
+It seems that it is not only that the ugly and unmeaning things have
+grown, like a filthy fungus, over the sheer beauty of the world, but
+that the things that people mean to be beautiful are not beautiful, and
+the things they mean to be interesting lack interest.
+
+And the disease is universal: it attacks new things as well as old. The
+cinematographs even, newest of the new, as things went in the old
+world; already the canker has eaten them up. In the first year of
+Picture Palaces we all crowded to see beautiful pictures of beautiful
+places: Niagara, the Zambesi Falls, the Grand Canyon. The comic pieces
+were perhaps French, but they were certainly funny. Also we saw the way
+the world lived, when it was the other side of the world: "Elephants
+a-piling teak," naked savages, or as near naked as don't matter, moving
+in ceremonial dance before the idols that were the gods of their deep
+dangerous faith. Dramas of love and death and pity and poverty. Quite
+often in the early days the cinematograph tale was of some workman
+driven by want to the theft of a loaf. It is true that the story
+generally ended in his conviction and the adoption of his charming baby
+girl by the wife of the _Juge d'Instruction_, but all the same people
+saw some one poor and sad and tempted, and were sorry and sad for his
+sake. Also we had tales of Indians with men that rode amain, and horses
+that one longed to bestride, such beauties they were, all fire and
+delicate strong temperament. War dramas too there were, where the hero
+left his sweetheart, and turned coward perhaps, redeeming himself with
+magnificent completeness in the splendid _debacle_ of a forlorn hope.
+That is all over. Already the sordid, heavy hand that smears commercial
+commonplace on all the bright facets of romance has obscured the vivid
+possibilities of the cinematograph. We have now for fun the elaborate
+hurting of one American person by another American person; for scenery,
+American flat-iron buildings; for romance the incredibly unimportant
+emotions of fleshy American actresses and actors. There are two girls,
+good and bad; two men, bad and good. In the end the good man gets the
+good girl, which is, of course, as it should be, or would be if we could
+believe in any moral quality in these fat-faced impersonators. You don't
+care a bit who wins, but none the less, the four of them mouth and mop
+and mow and make faces at you through five interminable acts, and when
+the good young man marries the good young woman in a parlour grossly
+furnished according to American ideals, you feel that both of them are
+well punished for their unpardonable existence. All real and delicate
+romance has, we observe, been wiped out by the cinematograph.
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL OF PEARL AND RED]
+
+It has long been the fashion to sneer at the Crystal Palace, and indeed
+the poor dear has gone from bad to worse. There are exhibitions there
+all exactly like all other exhibitions: Switch-backs, _Montagnes
+Russes_, Silhouettes, Tumble-scumbles, Weary waves, Threepenny thrills
+(where you hustle against strangers and shriek at the impact). But once
+the Crystal Palace was otherwise. In the Victorian days we sneer at,
+when our fathers could not see that there was any quarrel between
+knowledge and beauty, both of whom they loved, they built the Crystal
+Palace as a Temple vowed to these twin Deities of their worship. Think
+what the Crystal Palace was then. Think what its authors intended it to
+be. Think what, for a little time, it was. A place of beauty, a place
+where beauty and knowledge went hand in hand. It is quite true that a
+Brobdingnagian Conservatory does not seem so beautiful to us as it did
+to the Prince Consort and Sir Joseph Paxton. It is true that even in the
+palmiest days of the Crystal Palace you barked your shins over iron
+girders--painted a light blue, my memory assures me--and that the boards
+of the flooring were so far apart that you could lose, down the cracks
+of them, not only your weekly sixpence or your birthday shilling, but
+even the sudden unexpected cartwheel (do they still call a crown that?)
+contributed by an uncle almost more than human. It is true that the
+gravel of the paths in the "grounds" tired your feet and tried your
+temper, and that the adventure ended in a clinging to bony fingers and
+admonitions from nurse "not to drag so." But on the other hand. . . .
+
+Think of the imagination, the feeling for romance that went to the
+furnishing of the old Crystal Palace. There was a lake in the grounds of
+Penge Park. How would our twentieth century _entrepreneurs_ deal with a
+lake? We need not pause to invent an answer. We know it would be
+something new and nasty. How did these despised mid-Victorians deal with
+it? They set up, amid the rocks and reeds and trees of the island in
+that lake, life-sized images of the wonders of a dead world. On a great
+stone crouched a Pterodactyl, his vast wings spread for flight. A
+mammoth sloth embraced a tree, and I give you my word that when you came
+on him from behind, you, in your six years, could hardly believe that he
+was not real, that he would not presently leave the tree and turn his
+attention to your bloused and belted self. (Little boys wore caps with
+peaks then, and blouses with embroidered collars.) Convinced, at last,
+by the cold feel of his flank to your fat little hand, that he was but
+stone, you kept, none the less, a memory of him that would last your
+life, and make his name, when you met it in a book, as thrilling as the
+name of a friend in the list of birthday honours. There was an
+Ichthyosaurus too, and another chap whose name I forget, but he had a
+scalloped crest all down his back to the end of his tail. And the
+Dinosaurus . . . he had a round hole in his antediluvian stomach: and,
+with a brother--his own turn to come next, as in honour bound--to give
+you a leg-up, you could explore the roomy interior of the Dinosaur with
+feelings hardly to be surpassed by those of bandits in a cave. It is
+almost impossible to over-estimate the Dinosaurus as an educational
+influence. On your way back to the Palace itself you passed Water
+Temples surrounded by pools where water-lilies grew. Afterwards, when
+you read of tanks and lotuses and India, you knew what to think.
+
+There were Sphinxes--the correct plural was told you by aunts, and you
+rejected it on the terrace--and, within, more smooth water with marble
+at the edge and more lilies, and goldfish, palms, and ferns, and humming
+pervasive music from the organ. There were groves or shrubberies; you
+entered them a-tremble with a fearful joy. You knew that round the next
+corner or the next would be black and brown and yellow men; savages,
+with their huts and their wives and their weapons, their
+looking-glass-pools and their reed tunics, so near you that it was only
+a step across a little barrier and you could pretend that you also were
+a black, a brown, or a yellow person, and not a little English child in
+a tunic, belt, and peaked cap. You never took the step, but none the
+less those savages were your foes and your friends, and when you met
+them in your geography you thrilled to the encounter.
+
+Further, there were Courts; I first met Venus, the armless wonder of
+Milo, and Hermes, embodied vision of Praxiteles, and the Discobolus,
+whom we all love, and who is exactly like Mr. Graham Wallas in youth, in
+the Grecian Court. In the Egyptian Court there were pictured pillars,
+and the very word Egypt is to me for their sake a Word of Power to this
+day. And the Spanish Court, the court of the Alhambra, the lovely
+mosaic, the gold and the blue and the red, the fountain, the marble, the
+strange unnatural beauty of the horseshoe arches. . . .
+
+I shall never see the Alhambra now, but it is because of the Spanish
+Court at the Crystal Palace that there will always be an empty ache in
+my thought, an ache of the heart, a longing that is not all pain, at its
+name, a feeling like a beautiful dwarf despair, in that I never shall
+see that blue and red and golden glory, and the mystery of its strange
+mis-shapen arches that open to the whole world of dreams.
+
+Say of the Mid-Victorians what you will; they did at least know, when
+they set them, the seeds of Romance. Think of Euston Station: those
+glorious pillars, the magnificent dream of an Egyptian building to loom
+through the Egyptian darkness of London's fogs. And the architecture of
+Egypt was too expensive, and Euston remains, a magnificent memorial--the
+child of genius stunted by finance.
+
+There was Madame Tussaud's too, a close link with the French Revolution:
+the waxen heads of kings and democrats, the very guillotine itself. And
+Madame Tussaud's daughter, with the breathing breast that seemed alive,
+and the little old woman in the black bonnet, Madame herself, who had
+seen the rise of Republics and the deaths of kings. These things, last
+time I trod those halls, were put in the shade, their place usurped by
+vulgar tableaux, explaining to the bored spectators what happens to a
+vulgar young man with a wife whose skirt is much too short in front and
+her hair very badly done, if he leaves his home for the society of
+sirens and cardsharpers. The tableaux were cheap and nasty, and taught
+one nothing that one could not learn from the _Police News_.
+
+Once there were nightingales that sang in the gardens on Loampit Hill.
+Now it is all villas. Once the Hilly Fields were hilly fields where the
+children played, and there were primroses. Once the road from Eltham to
+Woolwich was a grassy lane with hedges and big trees in the hedges, and
+wild pinks and Bethlehem stars, and ragged robin and campion. Now the
+trees are cut down and there are no more flowers. It is asphalt all the
+way, and here and there seats divided by iron rods so that tired tramps
+should not sleep on them. And the green fields by Mottingham where the
+kingcups used to grow, and the willows by the little stream, they are
+eaten up by yellow caterpillars of streets all alike, all horrible;
+while in London old handsome houses are tenements, and children play on
+the dirty doorsteps of them with dead mice and mutton bones for toys. In
+the country women wear men's tweed caps instead of sunbonnets, and
+Hinde's curlers by day instead of curl papers (which if you were pretty,
+looked like wreaths of white roses) by night. And everything is getting
+uglier and uglier. And no one seems to care. And only the old people
+remember that things were not always ugly, remember how different
+things were--once.
+
+[Illustration: A CHINESE TEMPLE.]
+
+Therefore I would plead with all those who have to do with children to
+resist and to denounce uglification wherever they may meet with it, and
+to remember that there is knowledge which goes hand in hand with beauty.
+To show a child beautiful things, and to answer as well all the
+questions he will ask about them, to charm and thrill his imagination
+with pictures and statues and models of the wonders of the world, to
+familiarise the child with beauty, so that he knows ugliness when he
+meets it, and hates it for the outrage it is to the beauty he has known
+and loved ever since he was very little--this is worth doing. If we
+would make beauty the dear rule of a man's life, and ugliness the hated
+exception, we should make beauty as familiar to the child as the air he
+breathes, and if we associate knowledge with beauty the child will love
+them both.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Of Building and Other Matters
+
+
+A MOMENT of rapturous anticipation lights life when the kind aunt or
+uncle has given the bricks, when the flat, sliding lid has been slipped
+back, and the smooth wooden cubes and oblongs have tumbled resoundingly
+on table or floor.
+
+"I am going to build a palace," says the child. Or a tower or a church.
+And, the highest hopes inspiring him, he sets out on the new adventure.
+But he does not build a palace or a church, or even a railway station.
+What he builds is a factory, or a wall, or, in the case of the
+terra-cotta bricks, a portion of a French gentleman's country villa--the
+kind you see dozens of along the railway between Paris and Versailles.
+And however strong the child's desire that what he shall build shall be
+a palace or a church, that is, something beautiful and romantic, what he
+does build will always be the last thing he does, or ought to, admire.
+The fault is in the materials. They are lacking both in quality and
+quantity. No box of bricks that can at present be bought for money will
+build anything that can satisfy an imaginative child. An ordinary box of
+bricks--a really handsome one--measures, say, 12 by 8 by 2 in. If
+anything admirable is to be built from this amount of material the
+material ought to be presented in very small cubes, oblongs and
+arches--say 1 in. by 1/2 in. for the largest bricks, and going down to 1/4
+by 1/4 by 1/4 in. Given these proportions a really pretty though
+undistinguished building might result. But in the box of bricks 12 by 8
+by 2 in. the smallest cube measures 3/4 in. and the largest brick 9 by 3/4
+by 3/4 in. These long slabs of surface cannot be broken and disguised in
+such small buildings as the only ones which the materials are enough to
+build. Hence, the deadly monotony of facade, broken only by the three
+or, in the case of the really handsome box, five arches, and suggesting
+nothing so much as a "works" or a workhouse.
+
+[Illustration: THE SQUARE TOWER.]
+
+In the bricks themselves there is not enough variety. The stone bricks,
+it is true, have broken out into a variety of ugly shapes and a blue
+colour with which you can, if you like, build a Mansard roof. But a
+Mansard roof in a coarse ugly blue tint, is no thing of beauty.
+Besides, it needs a solid substructure to support it, and if you make
+your building solid, every brick in your box will be used up, and all
+you will have to show for it will be a partially built wing of a
+peculiarly undesirable villa residence, replete with every modern
+inconvenience. Nor must it be supposed that the difficulty can be met
+by adding more and more boxes of bricks. Add them, by all means; and the
+result will be a larger and probably an uglier factory, or a completed,
+and therefore more completely hideous, villa. Unless you are a
+millionaire, and have a toy cupboard as big as a pantechnicon, you will
+never have enough bricks to build up the solid masses which rest the
+eye, and give solidity and dignity to architecture. Among such solid
+masses _steps_ are not the least important. Every child knows that a
+really good flight of steps will take half the bricks in his box and
+leave insufficient material for the edifice to which the steps were
+intended to lead up. The tall broad smooth wall, its quiet surface
+disturbed only by one or two windows, a flight of steps and a doorway,
+is for ever out of reach of the child who has only bricks wherewith to
+build.
+
+[Illustration: SHELL ARCHES]
+
+The arches supplied with boxes of bricks are usually few and badly
+proportioned. There is seldom any provision for setting them up in a
+colonnade.
+
+The pillars which will support the ends of two arches are too wide for
+the _end_ arch, which is single. This difficulty is dealt with in stone
+bricks, but not in wooden ones; at any rate so far as my experience
+goes.
+
+There never was a time, one supposes, when so much money was spent on
+children and their toys. It is impossible to believe that, should some
+toy maker design and put on the market really desirable bricks for
+children, there would not be a ready sale for them. I suggest, then,
+that bricks are too large, and too small--and that what is needed is
+much smaller bricks, and much larger ones. The bricks in the old chest
+in our nursery started with 2-in. cubes, and went on in gradations of
+2-in. to the largest brick--12 by 2 by 2 in. The chest itself must have
+been at least 4 by 2 by 1-1/2 ft. Another detestable quality in our modern
+bricks is their inexactness--a sixteenth or even a quarter of an inch,
+more or less, is no more to the maker of bricks nowadays than it is to
+a bad dressmaker. Our bricks were well and truly cut: they were of
+seasoned oak, smooth and pleasant to touch--none of the rough-sawn edges
+which vex the hand and render the building unstable; they were heavy--a
+very important quality in bricks. They "stayed put." I suggest that such
+bricks as these, supplemented by arches of varied curves, but unvarying
+thicknesses, and slabs of board varying in breadth but not in length,
+would not be a toy beyond the purse of kind uncles and aunts, and
+certainly not beyond the means of our Council schools. The slabs of
+boards are to build steps with and to make roofs with. Every child who
+has ever built with bricks feels the reckless wastefulness of using for
+steps the bricks so much needed for walls and towers. And who has not
+experienced the aggravation of finding when his tower is built that he
+has used up all the long bricks near its foundation and has now none
+left which are long enough to lay across its summit and form its roof?
+The slabs of board should be, like the bricks, of seasoned oak, and
+should be an inch thick. There should be plenty of arches--so as to
+render possible some sort of resemblance to Norman and classical
+architecture.
+
+But bricks alone, however beautiful and varied, cannot as building
+material have the value which material freely chosen would have.
+Children love to make mud pies, and to build sand castles, because the
+material is plastic and responds with more or less of docility to their
+demands upon it. Also there is always enough of it, which there never is
+of bricks, or for the matter of that, of plasticine. I can imagine a
+splendid happiness for a child in a bushel of plasticine--but the sticks
+of plasticine are too small to be made into anything architecturally
+satisfying; and much too expensive for ordinary children to have in any
+but such quantities as encourage niggling. You will notice that children
+never tire of building sand castles on the sea-shore--but they would
+soon tire of building with a quart of damp sand on a table. It is true
+that the sea washes away your sand castle, usually before it is
+finished, but its end is finely catastrophic and full of damp delightful
+incident. Also the climax has the great essential of drama--it is
+inevitable. How different the demolition of the brick-built house by
+mamma, who wants space for cutting out, or by Mary, who desires to lay
+the table. The most promising of palaces, the most beautiful of bridges,
+are, at the urgence of these grown-up needs, swept away, and so, never
+being able to finish anything, the builder becomes discouraged. Perhaps
+he takes to the floor as an eligible building site, only to find his
+buildings exposed to the tempestuous petticoat of Mary, or the
+carelessly stepping high-heeled shoes of mamma. The same thing happens
+with a dolls' school, or a dolls' dinner-party, or any game requiring
+pageantry of any sort--so that little girls who would like their dolls
+to be actors in some scene of magnificence find no safe place for the
+actors save in their arms--and nurse with enforced premature maternal
+fussings the doll who, in happier circumstances, might be a Druid or a
+martyr, or Francis the First at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It is
+better to the child's mind that the cherished doll should safely be baby
+for ever, than that it should be Francis the First and get walked on.
+
+In any house where space makes such a thing possible, a table might be
+set aside for children, to be their very own--a table on which neither
+food nor millinery should ever trespass. Of course it is needful that
+toys and pseudo-toys should be "put away" daily, but it is not necessary
+that they should all be put away. Those which are being used in some
+splendid half-developed scheme might surely be allowed to stay where
+they are, so that it may be possible to go on with the game next day. A
+truce might be called of that ruthless tidying up which, every day,
+destroys the new idea, and compels the child each day to produce a new
+scheme instead of allowing it to work on yesterday's and bring it to
+something a little nearer the perfection which it touched when the
+child's mind first conceived it. But, it may be urged, children leave
+everything half-finished, and go off to something else. Of course they
+do--but clear away the half-finished thing, and you will find when they
+come back from the butterfly flight after some other interest, that they
+will not be pleased with you.
+
+"I've put all your bricks nicely away," you say proudly; and Tommy will
+say "Bother!" in his heart, even if his lips are sufficiently trained to
+avoid that expletive and to substitute: "I do wish you hadn't: I wanted
+to finish building my tower."
+
+You see one thing leads to another. It isn't that children are any more
+bird-witted than we are: it is that they have not yet learned to
+restrain the thousand curiosities, desires, and creative impulses proper
+to their age. You, of course, if you desired to set up a tableau of the
+Field of the Cloth of Gold, would sit down with a bit of pencil and the
+back of an envelope and jot down all the properties required for staging
+the scene. But the child who has "had" the Field "in History," and whose
+imagination has been stirred by the name of it--a thing that will happen
+under the stupidest of teachers--sets up Henry and Francis in paper
+crowns and only then begins to see that tents and banners and cloth of
+gold are lacking. Perhaps he goes off to the village shop to get flags,
+perhaps to your handkerchief case for tent-cloth, perhaps to the meadow
+beyond the orchard to gather buttercups. While on any of these quests
+some supremely important event may strike across his plans, and
+overshadow them--a new kitten, a gift from the gardener of plants for
+his little garden, or the fact that some one is going fishing. Then
+Francis and Henry are forgotten, the buttercups left dying on the
+doorstep, and the tent-cloth crammed into the pockets among string,
+stamps, acid drops, and pieces of the watch he took to pieces last
+holidays and never put together again, and he will follow the new trail.
+But he will come back to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and if you have
+"tidied up" the kings and put their crowns in the wastepaper basket the
+child will be disappointed and worried, his imagination checked and his
+scheme baffled.
+
+[Illustration: HANDKERCHIEF TENTS.]
+
+His annexation of your handkerchiefs will not occur if you have
+accustomed him to come to you or to his nurse for the means to his small
+ends; but if there is no one to whom he can apply for help, you will
+find that he will not stick at the sacred threshold of your handkerchief
+case. The tents of the Field of the Cloth of Gold will be far more
+important to him than the inviolability of that scented
+treasure-house--unless, of course, you happen to have explained to him
+exactly how much you dislike that your handkerchiefs should keep the
+sort of company they meet with in his pockets. Then, if he loves you,
+and has found you reasonable, he will refrain, while wondering at your
+prejudices. But he will--or ought to--find some other material for
+tents--letter paper perhaps. Letter paper makes quite good tents, though
+not nearly so good, of course, as handkerchiefs folded
+diagonally--supported by a central pole, say a penholder, and fastened
+down at the tucked-in corners with pins or rose thorns. You can explain
+to him that rose-thorns hurt handkerchiefs, but you will not punish him
+if this has not occurred to him. And this brings one to the question of
+crime and punishment, of which perhaps I had better say what I have to
+say before I go on talking about bricks and how to supplement them. As
+I was saying, one thing leads to another.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The Moral Code
+
+
+IN attempting to explain and enforce a moral code, the first and most
+essential need is to formulate definitely to oneself the code which one
+proposes to enforce and to explain. There is nothing from which
+children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the
+incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them. Before you
+can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your
+heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it, before
+you can gain a willing obedience to it from those on whom you wish to
+impose it. By this I do not mean only that we ought to make up our minds
+whether this, that, or the other isolated act is right or wrong, as it
+occurs, but that we ought to have a clear perception and knowledge of
+the things that are right and the things that are wrong, and have a
+standard which we can apply to any new action brought under our notice,
+so that, measuring the new act by our old standard, we shall be able to
+say, with some sort of rough accuracy, "This is wrong," or "This is
+right."
+
+And the standard of expediency is not a good one for this purpose, nor
+is the standard of custom, nor yet the standard of gentility or the
+standard of success in life. Children are not good judges of expediency.
+The law of mere custom will not be strong enough to bind them when
+desire calls with enchanting voice to forbidden things. Gentility and
+the gospel of getting on will leave them cold. You may at first deal
+merely with a succession of unrelated particulars, saying, "This is
+right," "This is wrong," beating down the children's questionings by
+your mere _Ipse dixit_; but a time will come when it will not be enough,
+in answer to their "Why is it wrong?" "Why is it right?" to answer
+"Because I say so." The child will want some other standard which he
+himself can apply. The standard of what you say may be a shifting one,
+and anyhow, he cannot be at all sure what you will say unless he knows
+what is your standard, the standard by which you will decide whether to
+say, in any given case, that a thing is wrong or right. And in order
+that you may clearly set before the child your own moral standard you
+must first have set it very clearly before yourself. It is not enough
+to say, "Stealing is wrong," "Lying is wrong," "Greediness is wrong." If
+you feel that these things are wrong because they are contrary to the
+will of God, you will not find that that explanation is sufficient for a
+child unless he knows very much more about God than His name and certain
+miraculous and incomprehensible attributes of His. He will want to know
+what is the will of God, to which these wrong things are contrary. And
+he will want very much to know the definite right as well as the
+definite wrong. You will have to give the child a standard that can be
+applied to positives as well as negatives.
+
+There is a very simple standard by which to measure the actions of
+children--and, much more severely, our own actions. It is set up in the
+words of Christ: "Do unto others as you would they should do unto
+you"--a standard so simple that quite little children can understand and
+apply it, a standard so severe that were it understood and applied by us
+who are no longer children, the warped, tangled, rotten web we call
+civilisation could not endure for a day. There is no other standard by
+which a child can judge its own actions, and yours, and judge them
+justly.
+
+Having fixed your standard it will be necessary to try your own actions
+by it as well as the child's. And this standard will give you the only
+vital code of morality, because it compels the continual exercise of
+imagination, the continual preening and flight of the wings of the soul.
+You cannot order your life by that Divine precept without a hundred
+times a day asking yourself, "How should _I_ like that, if I were not
+myself?" without continually putting yourself, imaginatively, in some
+one else's place. And when the child asks, "Why is it wrong to steal?"
+you can lead him to see how little he would like to have his own
+possessions stolen. When he asks, "Why is it wrong to lie?" you may
+teach him to imagine his own bitterness if others should deceive him. It
+is, of course, much easier to say, "It is wrong because I say so," or
+even "because God says so"; but if you want to mark it right or wrong,
+to grave it deeply and ineffaceably on the tables of the heart and the
+soul, teach the child to see for himself _how_ things are right and
+wrong--and to judge of them by that one Divine and unfailing rule.
+
+Of course even when the child knows what is right he will not always do
+it, any more than you do: and one of the questions to be considered is
+how you shall deal with those lapses from moral rectitude of which he,
+no less than you, will often be guilty. Punishments, the old savage
+punishments, were revenge, and nothing but revenge, a desire to "pay
+out" the offender, to take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. More
+humane and reasonable legislators have sought to prove that punishment
+is curative--that the fear of punishment will deter people from doing
+wrong. A distinguished official of the Home Office gave it as his
+opinion only the other day that punishment, no matter how severe, will
+not act as a deterrent, if there is ever so slight a chance of the
+criminal's escaping it. What would deter would be the _certainty_ of
+punishment, however slight. Now since you are not omniscient you cannot
+pretend to your child that if he does wrong you are certain to know and
+to punish him: if you are silly enough to pretend it, he will find you
+out immediately, and estimate your lie at its true blackness. You can,
+however, without any pretence, assure him that if he does wrong he
+himself will know it, that it will make him feel unclean and nasty, and
+miserable till he is able to wash himself in the waters of repentance
+and forgiveness. That if he acts meanly and dirtily he will feel dirty
+and mean, and if he acts bravely and cleanly he will feel clean and
+brave. And he will find that what you say is true. But not unless you
+shall have succeeded in convincing him that your standard is a true
+standard, and that the things which that standard shows to be wrong are
+wrong indeed. Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the
+child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the
+knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.
+
+No one desires, of course, that a child should be always feeling his own
+moral pulse: if he has learned that there is a right and a wrong way he
+will not be always bothering about which way he may be living--it will
+be only when something goes amiss that he will stop and consider. Just
+as one does not stop to think whether one is breathing properly, only
+when one chokes one knows that one isn't.
+
+[Illustration: ONE HALF OF THE CITY.
+
+72]]
+
+Punishment, however, should not be confused with the consequences of
+action, and while children are yet too small to understand all that God
+may be to them, it is possible to show them the _consequences_ of their
+misdeeds, magnifying these beyond the consequences of the act to be
+reprobated and thus pointing the general moral. I mean that one may
+honourably apply, to the small wrong-doings of childhood, the _sort_
+of consequences--proportioned, of course, to the wrong-doing--which
+would result from such wrong-doing on a larger scale by a grown-up
+person. It will be exceedingly troublesome and painful for you, but
+perhaps its painfulness to you may be the measure of its value to the
+child. For instance, Tommy steals a penny, knowing that to steal pennies
+is wrong. He is very little, and a penny is very little, and your
+impulse, if not to slap him, might be to tell him that he is a very
+naughty boy and have done with it. It will go to your heart to bring
+home to him the consequences of theft, especially as you cannot do it at
+once; but if, next time you are about to send him to the shop for
+something, you say, "No: I can't send you because you might steal my
+pennies as you did the other day"--this will be hateful for you to
+do--but it will show him more plainly than anything else what happens to
+people who steal. They are not trusted. And the same with lies. Show him
+that those who tell lies are not believed.
+
+But, remembering how it felt to be a child, have pity, and do not teach
+him these lessons when any one else is there. Let the humiliation of
+them be a secret between you two alone. Only when a wrong has been done
+which demands a restitution or an amend should the soul of the child,
+shamed with wrong-doing, be exposed to alien eyes.
+
+When we sit in judgment on the aggressions and on the shortcomings of
+others the first need is neither justice nor mercy, but imagination with
+self-knowledge. The judge should be able to put himself in the place of
+the accused, to perceive, by sympathetic vision, the point of view of
+the one who stands before the judgment-seat. The judge is an adult human
+being, and therefore has some knowledge of the mental and moral
+processes of human beings. He should use this knowledge; and when it
+comes to a grown-up judging a child, it is no less necessary for the
+judge to place himself imaginatively in the place of the small offender.
+And this cannot be done by imagination and self-consideration alone.
+Memory is needed. Let me say it again: there is only one way of
+understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by
+observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory.
+Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a
+child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings
+of children. When you were a child you suffered intensely from
+injustice, from want of understanding, in your grown-up censors. You
+were punished when you had not meant to do wrong: you escaped punishment
+when you had not meant to do right. The whole scheme of grown-up law
+seemed to you, and very likely was, arbitrary and incomprehensible. And
+you suffered from it desperately. So much that, even if you have now
+forgotten all that you suffered, the mark of that suffering none the
+less remains on your soul to this day.
+
+It would seem that the humiliations, the mortifications endured in
+childhood leave an ineffaceable brand on the spirit. How then can we not
+remember, and, remembering, refrain from hurting other children as we
+were hurt?
+
+The spirit of the child is sensitive to the slightest change in the
+atmosphere about him. You can convey disapproval quite easily--and
+approval also. But while most parents and guardians are constantly alive
+to the necessity for expressing disapproval and inflicting punishment,
+the other side of the medal seems to be hidden from them.
+
+The most prevalent idea of training children is the idea of prohibition
+and punishment. "You are not to do it! You will? Then take that!" the
+blow or punishment following, expresses simply and exactly the whole
+theory of moral education held by the mass of modern mothers. The vast
+mistake, both in the education of children and government of nations, is
+the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues. Also the fact that
+punishment follows on the failure _not_ to do certain things--whereas no
+commensurate reward is offered even for success in _not_ doing, let
+alone for success in active and honourable well-doing. The reward of
+negative virtue is negative also, and consists simply in non-punishment.
+The rewards of active virtue are, in the world of men, money and praise.
+But there are deeds for which money cannot pay, and sometimes these are
+rewarded by medals and paragraphs in the newspapers--not at all the same
+thing as being rewarded by the praise of your fellow-men. Now children,
+like all sane human beings, love praise. They love it more keenly
+perhaps than other human beings because their natural craving for it has
+not been overlaid with false modesties and shames. They have not learned
+that
+
+    Praise to the face
+    Is open disgrace.
+
+On the contrary, praise to the face seems to them natural, right, and
+altogether desirable. See that they get it.
+
+Do you remember when you were little how you struggled to exercise some
+tiresome negative virtue, such as not biting your nails, not teasing the
+cat, not executing, with your school-boots, that heavy shuffling
+movement, so simply relieving to you, so mysteriously annoying to the
+grown-ups? Can you have forgotten how for ages and ages--three or four
+days, even--you refrained from drinking water with your mouth full of
+food, from leaving your handkerchief about in obvious spots natural and
+convenient, how you sternly denied yourself the pleasure of drawing your
+hoop stick along the front railings--because, though you enjoyed this
+musical exercise, others did not? And how, all through the interminable
+period of self-denial, you heartened yourself to these dismal
+refrainings by the warm comfortable thought, "_Won't_ they be
+pleased?"--and how they never were. They took it all as a matter of
+course. To them, because they had forgotten how it felt to be a child,
+all your heroic sacrifices and renunciations counted as nothing. To them
+it was natural that a child should keep his fingers out of his mouth,
+and off the tail of Puss, should keep his feet still and his
+handkerchief in his pocket, should do the suitable things with meat,
+drink, and hoop-sticks. They never noticed, and so they never praised.
+But when, worn out by long abstinence from natural joys, natural
+relaxations, you broke one of those rules which seemed to you so useless
+and so arbitrary, then they noticed fast enough.
+
+[Illustration: THE TAIL OF PUSS.]
+
+"Can you _never_ remember," they said, "just a simple thing like not
+biting your nails?" Bitter aloes following, no doubt. Or, "I really
+should have thought," they would say, "that considering the number of
+times I've spoken about it you would remember not to make that frightful
+noise," with boots or hoop sticks or a blade of wet grass or what not.
+They did not pause to think, in their earnest grown-up business of
+"bringing the boy up," how many, how very many, and how seemingly silly,
+were the "don'ts" which you had to remember. But you will not be like
+that: you will notice and approve, and most needful of all, reward with
+praise the earnest, difficult refrainings of the child who is trying to
+please you: who is trying to learn the long table of your commandments
+all beginning with "Thou shalt not," and to practise them, not because
+these commandments appeal to him as reasonable or just or useful, but
+just because he loves you, wants to please you, and, deepest need of
+love, wants you to be pleased with him.
+
+A hasty yet determined effort at putting yourself in his place is the
+thing needed every time you have to sit in judgment on the actions of
+another human being--most of all when that human being is a little
+child. If we cultivated this habit we should not hurt other people as we
+do. I have seen cruel things.
+
+A little girl, suffering from a slight affection of the eye, was given
+by a sympathetic aunt the run of a box of that aunt's old ball-dresses.
+She spent a whole hour in arranging a costume which seemed to her to be
+of royal beauty. A crushed pink tulle dress, a many-coloured striped
+Roman sash, white satin slippers, put on over the black strapped shoes,
+and turning up very much at the toes. White gloves, very dirty and
+wrinkled like a tortoise's legs over the plump dimpled arms. Hair
+dressed high on the head over a pad of folded stockings, secured by
+hairpins borrowed from the housemaid. A wreath, of crushed red calico
+roses from somebody's last summer's hat, some pearl beads, the property
+of cook, and a blue heart out of a cracker--saved since Christmas.
+
+"I am a beautiful Princess," said the child, and the housemaid responded
+heartily: "That you are, ducky, and no mistake. Go and show mother."
+
+But mother, when she was told that this stumbling, long-tailed bundle of
+crushed finery was a beautiful Princess, laughed and said, "Princess
+Rag-Bag, I should say."
+
+"It's only pretending, you know," the child explained, wondering why
+explanations should be needed by mother and not by Eliza.
+
+The mother laughed again. "I shouldn't pretend to be a Princess with
+that great stye in my eye," she said, and thought no more about it.
+
+But the child remembers to this day how she slunk away and tore off the
+beautiful Princess-clothes, and cried and cried and cried, and wished
+that she was dead. Children really do wish that, sometimes.
+
+Another form of cruelty is mere carelessness. A child spends hours in
+preparing some surprise for you--decorates your room with flowers, not
+in the best taste perhaps, and fading maybe before your impatiently
+awaited arrival--or ties scarves and handkerchiefs to the banisters to
+represent flags at your home-coming.
+
+"Very pretty, dear," you say carelessly, hardly looking--and the child
+sees that you hardly look, "and now clear it all away, there's a dear!"
+
+The child clears it all away, and with the dying flowers something else
+is cleared away, something that will no more live again than will the
+faded flowers.
+
+Be generous of praise--it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of
+kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the
+child the true Elixir of Life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Praise and Punishment
+
+
+[Illustration: THE OTHER HALF OF THE CITY.
+
+82]]
+
+WHILE admitting that no pains can be too great, no labours too arduous
+to spend upon the education of the child, we must not shut our eyes to
+the fact that the sacrifice of the grown-up may often be better for
+him--or much more often her--than it is for the child for whom that
+sacrifice is made. There is a certain danger that the enthusiastic
+educator, passionately desiring to sacrifice her whole life, may
+incidentally, and quite without meaning it, sacrifice something very
+vital in the child. For the child whose every want is anticipated, whose
+every thought is considered, who is surrounded by the softness of love
+and the sweetness of sympathy, is not unlikely to disappoint and dismay
+the fond parent or guardian, pastor or master, by growing up selfish,
+cowardly, heartless and ungrateful; with no capacity for obedience, no
+power of endurance, no hardihood, no resource--whining in adversity
+and intolerable in success. The object of education is to fit the child
+for the life of the man. Once it was held that a rigorous discipline,
+enforced by violence, was the best preparation for the life which is
+never too easy or too soft. Now we have changed all that, and there is
+some danger that the pendulum may swing too far, and that the aim of
+education may come to mean only the ensuring of a happy childhood,
+without arming the child for the battle of life. It is right that to the
+educator the child should be the prime object, the centre of the
+universe, the prime consideration to which every other consideration
+must give way. But there is the danger that the child may become his own
+prime object, not only the centre of his own universe, but its
+circumference, and cherish, deeply rooted in his inmost soul, the
+conviction that all other considerations should and will give way to his
+desires.
+
+Life, we know, will teach him, in her rough, hard school, that he is
+only the centre of his own universe in that sense in which the same is
+true of us all--that far from being the prime object of the world which
+surrounds him, he himself counts for little or nothing, except to those
+who love him--and that the consideration he receives will not be, as was
+the consideration lavished on him in his childhood, free, ungrudging,
+and invariable, but will be conditioned by the services he renders to
+others and the extent to which he can be to them pleasant or useful.
+Life, it is true, will teach him all this, but if her teaching be a
+course of lessons in a wholly new subject, they will be very difficult
+to learn, and the learning will hurt. Whereas if, from the very
+beginning, the child is taught to understand the interdependence of
+human beings, the fact that rights involve duties and that duties confer
+rights, he will be able to apply and to use for his own help the lessons
+which later life will teach him. More, he will have at the outset of
+life the advantage which one with a clear conception of rights and
+duties has over one who only sees life as a muddle and maze of things
+that are "jolly hard lines." They suffer as without hope who see that
+the world needs mending, and have never made up their minds what sort of
+world they would like. Whereas the child to whom, quite early, the
+lesson of human solidarity has been taught will, when he shall be a man,
+know very well what he wants, and will be able, however humbly, to help,
+in his day and generation, to re-mould the world to the fashion of his
+desire.
+
+It is not difficult to teach children the duties of kindness and
+helpfulness to others, and the duty of public spirit and loyalty to
+their fellow-men. A healthy child is active, energetic, and deeply
+desirous of using his senses and his faculties. It is possible to assign
+to quite a small child certain duties, but the wise educator will manage
+to make such duties privileges and not tasks. The system of sentencing
+children to the performance of useful offices by way of punishment is
+abominable. It gives them for ever a distaste for that particular form
+of social service.
+
+If we must punish, let us not permit the punishments to trench on the
+province of useful and, in good conditions, pleasant tasks. Give the boy
+an imposition rather than an order to weed the shrubbery walk; set the
+girl to learn a French verb rather than to hem dusters. The
+consciousness of being useful is very dear to children--it is worth
+while to feel and to show gratitude to them for all services rendered,
+and though it may be, as they say, more trouble than it is worth to
+teach the children to help effectually, that only means that it is more
+trouble than the help they give is worth. What is really valuable is
+the cultivation of the sense that it is a good and pleasant thing to
+help mother to wash up, to help father to water the geraniums, and,
+further, a thing which will make father and mother pleased and grateful.
+Children, like the rest of us, love to feel themselves important. Is it
+not well that they should feel themselves important as givers, and not
+as claimants only?
+
+The tale of their public obligations may well begin with the lesson that
+it is part of the duty of a citizen to help to keep his city, his
+country, clean and beautiful. Therefore, we must not leave nasty traces
+of our presence in street or meadow--such traces as orange-peel,
+banana-skins, and the greasy bag that once held the bun or the
+bull's-eye. And it is quite as important to learn what we should as what
+we should not do. The idea and organisation of the Boy Scouts is a fine
+object-lesson in the way of training children to be good citizens. The
+duties of a citizen should be taught in all schools: they are more
+important than the latitude of Cathay and the industries of Kamskatka.
+Even the smallest children could learn something of this branch of
+education. I should like to write a little book of Moral Songs for Young
+Citizens, only I wouldn't call it that. The songs in it might take the
+place of "Mary had a little lamb" or whatever it is that they make the
+infants learn by heart. One of them might go something like this:
+
+    I must not steal, and I must learn
+    Nothing is mine that I do not earn.
+    I must try in work and play
+    To make things beautiful every day.
+    I must be kind to every one
+    And never let cruel things be done.
+    I must be brave, and I must try
+    When I am hurt never to cry,
+    And always laugh as much as I can
+    And be glad that I'm going to be a man,
+    To work for my living and help the rest,
+    And never do less than my very best.
+
+Another might begin:
+
+    I must not litter the park or the street
+    With bits of paper or things to eat:
+    I must not pick the public flowers
+    They are not _mine_, but they are _ours_. . . .
+
+And so on. Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you
+all your life. The duties and refrainings just touched on here might be
+elaborated in different poems. There might be one on being brave, and
+another on prompt obedience to the word of command. There is no position
+in life where the habit of obedience to your superior officer is not of
+value. To teach obedience without bullying would be quite easy: with
+very little children it could take the form of a game, in which a
+series of orders were given--for the performance of such actions as
+occur in the mulberry bush; and the competition among the children to be
+the first to obey the new order would quicken the child's mind and body,
+while the habit of obedience to the word of command would be firmly
+planted, so that it would grow with the child's growth and adapt itself
+to the needs of life. I would write more than one poem, I think, about
+the green country and the shame it is that those who should love and
+protect it desecrate it as they do. Let it be the pride of the child
+that he is not of the sort of people who leave greasy papers lying about
+in woods, broken bottles in meadows, and old sardine tins among the
+rushes at the margin of cool streams. Such people touch no foot of land
+that they do not desecrate and defile. Wherever they are suffered to be,
+there they leave behind them the vilest leavings. Filthy papers, the
+rinds and skins of fruit, crusts and parings, jagged tins, smashed
+bottles, straw and shavings and empty stained cardboard boxes. They
+leave it all, openly and shamelessly, making the magic meadows sordid as
+a suburb, and carrying into the very heart of the country the
+vulgarities of the street corner. It is time, indeed, that certain of
+the finer duties of citizenship were taught in all schools, Harrow as
+well as Houndsditch, Eton as well as Borstal. And one of the first of
+these is the keeping of the beauty of beautiful places unsmirched, the
+duty of preserving for others the beauty which we ourselves admire, the
+duty of burning bits of paper and burying pieces of orange-peel. If
+there is not time to teach geography as well as the duties and decencies
+of a citizen, the geography should go, and the duties and decencies be
+taught. For what is the use of knowing the names of places if you do not
+know that places should be beautiful, and what is the use of knowing how
+many counties there are in England unless you know also that every field
+and every tree and every stream in every one of those counties is a
+precious gift of God not to be desecrated by shameless refuse and
+garbage, but to be cared for as one cares for one's garden, and loved,
+as one should love every inch of our England, this garden-land more
+beautiful than any garden in the world?
+
+A child should be taught to read almost as soon as it has learned to
+speak. I can remember my fourth birthday, but I cannot remember a time
+when I could not read. Without going into details as to the merits of
+different methods of teaching, I may say that a good many words may be
+taught before it is necessary to teach the letters--that reading should
+precede spelling--that CAT should be presented whole, as the symbol of
+Cat--and that the dissection of it into C.A.T. should come later. I
+believe that children taught in this way, and taught young, will not in
+after life be tortured by the difficulties of spelling. They will spell
+naturally, as they speak or walk. Of the value of the accomplishment of
+reading, as a let-off to parents and guardians, it would be impossible
+to speak too highly. It keeps the child busy, amused, still and quiet.
+The value to the child himself is not less. Nor is it only that the
+matter of his reading stores his mind with new material. To him also it
+is a good thing that he should sometimes be still and quiet, and at the
+same time interested and occupied. Of books for little children there
+are plenty--not fine literature, it is true--but harmless. As the child
+grows older he will want more books, and different books--and if you
+insist on personally conducting him on his grand tour through literature
+he will probably miss a good many places that he would like to go to.
+For a child from ten onwards it is no bad thing to give the run of a
+good general library. When he has exhausted the story books he will
+read the ballads, the histories and the travels, and may even nibble at
+science, poetry, or philosophy. I myself, at the age of thirteen,
+browsed contentedly in such a library--where Percy's anecdotes in
+thirty-nine volumes or so divided my attention with Hume, Locke and
+Berkeley. I even read Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, and was none the
+worse for it. It is astonishing how little harm comes to children
+through books. Unless they have been taught by servants' chatter how to
+look for the "harm," they do not find it. I do not mean that absolutely
+every book is fit for a child's reading, but if you allow the reading of
+the Old Testament it is mere imbecility to insist that all the rest of
+your child's reading shall ignore the facts of life. You can always have
+a locked book-case if you choose: only see to it that the doors are not
+of glass, for the forbidden is always the desired.
+
+As regards the facts of life, by which I mean the physiological facts
+about which there is so much needless and vain concealment, there is, it
+seems to me, only one rule. If your child has learned to love and trust
+you it will come to you with its questions, instead of going to the
+housemaid or the groom. Answer all its questions truthfully, even at the
+cost of a little trouble in formulating your answers. Do not leave the
+child to learn the truth about its body and its birth from vulgar and
+tainted sources. There is absolutely nothing that you cannot decently
+tell a child when it has reached the age when it understands that
+certain things are not fit subjects for public conversation--and until
+it has reached that age it will not ask that sort of questions. There is
+no difficulty in making children understand that their digestive
+processes are not to be discussed in general society, and it is quite
+easy to explain to them that other physiological processes are also to
+be avoided as subjects for general conversation. The Cat and her family
+will help you to explain all that the child wants to know. The child
+should be taught that its body is the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and that
+it is our duty to keep our bodies healthy, clean, and well-exercised,
+just as we should try to keep our minds strong and active, and our
+hearts tender and pure. And one need not always "talk down" to children:
+they understand far better than you think. They are always flattered by
+talk that rises now and then above the level of their understanding. And
+if they do not understand they will tell you so, and you can simplify.
+In talking of the subjects which interest them, you need not be afraid
+of being too clever. For even if they do not ask, your instinct and the
+child's eyes will, if there be love and trust between you, tell you when
+you are getting out of its depth. But there must be love and trust:
+without that all education outside book-learning is for ever
+impossible.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+The One Thing Needful
+
+
+THE most ardent advocate of our present civilisation, the blindest
+worshipper of what we call progress, can hardly fail to be aware of the
+steadily increasing and brutal ugliness of life. Civilisation, whatever
+else it is, is a state in which a few people have the chance of living
+beautifully--those who take that chance are fewer still--and the
+enormous majority live, by no choice or will of their own, lives which
+at the best are uncomfortable, anxious, and lacking in beauty, and at
+the worst are so ugly, diseased, desperate, and wretched that those who
+feel their condition most can hardly bear to think of them, and those
+who have not imagination enough to feel it fully yet cannot bear it
+unless they succeed in persuading themselves that the poor of this world
+are the heirs of the next, while hoping, at the same time, that a
+portion of Lazarus's heavenly legacy may, after all, be reserved for
+Dives.
+
+The hideous disfigurement of lovely hills and dales with factories and
+mines and pot banks--coal, cinder, and slag; the defilement of bright
+rivers with the refuse of oil and dye works; the eating up of the green
+country by greedy, long, creeping yellow caterpillars of streets; the
+smoke and fog that veil the sun in heaven; the sordid enamelled iron
+advertisements that scar the fields of earth--all the torn paper and
+straw and dirt and disorder spring from one root. And from the same root
+spring pride, anger, cruelty, and sycophancy, the mean subservience of
+the poor and the mean arrogance of the rich. As the fair face of the
+green country is disfigured by all this machinery which ministers to the
+hope of getting rich, so is the face of man marred by the fear of
+getting poor. Look at the faces you see in the street--old and young,
+gay and sad--on all there is the brand of anxiety, a terrible anxiety
+that never rests, a fear that never sleeps, the anxiety for the future:
+the fear of poverty for the rich, the fear of starvation for the poor.
+Think of the miles and miles of sordid squalor and suffering in the East
+of London--not in comfortable Whitechapel, but out Canning Town way;
+think of Barking and Plaistow and Plashet and Bow--then think of Park
+Lane and Bond Street. And if your eyes are not blinded, the West is no
+less terrible than the East. If you want to be sure of this, bring a
+hungry, ragged child from that Eastern land and set it outside a West
+End restaurant; let it press its dirty little face against the plate
+glass and gaze at the well-to-do people gorging and guzzling round the
+bright tables inside. The diners may be smart, the ragged child may be
+picturesque--but bring the two together, and consider the conjunction.
+
+[Illustration: THE HIDEOUS DISFIGUREMENT.]
+
+And all this ugliness springs from the same cause. As Ruskin says: "We
+have forgotten God." We have therefore forgotten His attributes, mercy,
+loving-kindness, justice, truth, and beauty. Their names are still on
+our lips, but the great, stupid, crashing, blundering machine which we
+call civilisation knows them not. The Devil's gospel of _laissez-faire_
+still inspires the calloused heart of man. Each for himself, and Mammon
+for the foremost. We no longer care that life should be beautiful for
+all God's children--we wish it to be beautiful for us and forget who, as
+we wish that wish, becomes our foster-father. There can be no healing
+of the great wound in the body of mankind till each one of us would die
+rather than see the ugliness of a wound on the body of the least of
+these our brethren. But so dulled and stupefied is our sense of beauty,
+our sense of brotherhood, that our brother's wounds do not hurt us. We
+have not imagination enough to know how it feels to be wounded. Just as
+we have not imagination enough to see the green fields that lie crushed
+where Manchester sprawls in the smoke--the fair hills and streams on
+which has grown the loathsome fungus of Stockport.
+
+[Illustration: OF LOVELY HILLS AND DALES.]
+
+Now I do believe that this insensitiveness to ugliness and misery, this
+blindness to wanton befouling of human life and the green world, comes
+less from the corruption of man's heart than from the emptiness of the
+teaching which man receives when he is good and little and a child. The
+teaching in our schools is almost wholly materialistic. The child is
+taught the botanical name of the orange--dissects it and its flower and
+perhaps learns the Latin names of the flower and fruit; but it is not
+taught that oranges are things you will be pleased with yourself for
+giving up to some one who is thirstier than you are--or that to throw
+orange-peel on the pavement where some one may slip on it, fall and
+hurt himself, is as mean a trick as stealing a penny from a blind man.
+We teach the children about the wonders of gases and ethers, but we do
+not explain to them that furnaces ought to consume their own smoke, or
+why. The children learn of acids and starches, but not that it is a
+disgraceful thing to adulterate beer and bread. The rules of
+multiplication and subtraction are taught in schools, but not the old
+rule, "If any will not work, neither shall he eat."
+
+There is no dogmatical teaching. That means a diet of dry bones. It
+means that the child is never shown how to look for happiness in the
+performance of acts which do not, on the face of them, look as though
+they would make him happy. It is not explained to him that man's life
+and the will of God are like a poem--God writes a line and man must make
+the next line rhyme to it. When it does rhyme, then you get that
+happiness which can only come from harmony. And when you do your best to
+make your line rhyme and cannot--well, the Author of the first line
+knows that it was your best that you did. God is shown, when He is shown
+at all, to our modern children, as a sort of glorified head master, who
+will be tremendously down on you if you break the rules: alternatively
+as a sort of rich uncle who will give you things if you ask properly. He
+is not shown as the Father to whom you can tell everything.
+
+If you are successful in your work you win a prize and go home to your
+people, and tell them that you are first in history, receiving their
+applause without shame.
+
+If you are good at games or athletics you can tell your mates that you
+made two goals or eighty-three runs or whatever it is, and delight in
+their admiration. If you are an athlete the applause of the bystanders
+is your right and your reward.
+
+But whom can you tell of the little intimate triumphs, the secret
+successes, the temptations resisted, the kind things done, the gentle
+refrainings, the noble darings of that struggling, bewildered,
+storm-tossed little thing you call your soul?
+
+God, your Father, is the only person to whom you can talk of these. To
+him you can say: "Father, I wanted to pay Smith Minor out to-day for
+something he did last week, and I didn't because I thought You wouldn't
+like it. Are You pleased with Your boy?" Do they teach you this in
+schools or give you any hint or hope of what you will feel when your
+Father answers: "Yes, My son, I am pleased." Or do they teach you to
+say: "Father, I am sorry I was a beast to-day, and I'll try not to do it
+again"--and tell you that a Voice will answer, "I am sorry too, My
+son--but I am glad you told Me. Try again, dear lad. And let Me help
+you"?
+
+As you show your Latin exes. to your master, so you should be taught to
+show the leaves of your life to the only One who can read and understand
+that blotted record. And if you learn to show that book every day there
+will be less and less in it that you mind showing, and more and more
+that will give you the glow and glory of the heart that comes to him who
+hears "Faithful and good, well done."
+
+You cannot suppose that your life is rhyming with the will of God when
+you destroy the beauty of the country and of the lives of men so that
+you may get rich and you and your children may live without working.
+
+Can you imagine a company promoter who should say: "Father, I have made
+a lot of money out of a company which has gone to pieces, and a lot of
+other people are ruined, but I know that there must always be rich and
+poor, and if I didn't do it some one else would"?
+
+Or--"Father, I spoiled the green fields where children used to play and
+I have built a lot of streets of hideous and uncomfortable houses, but
+they are quite good enough for the working people. As long as they have
+such low wages they can't live like human beings. And Thou knowest, O
+Father, that wages are and must be regulated by the divine law of supply
+and demand."
+
+Or--"Father, I have put sand in the sugar and poison in the beer, alum
+in the bread and water in the milk, all these being, as Thou knowest,
+Father, long-established trade customs."
+
+Men can say these things to themselves and to each other, but there is
+One to whom they cannot say them. It is of Him and not only of the
+wonders of His Universe that I would have the children taught. But they
+are only taught of the wonders, not of the Wonder-worker.
+
+It is not that there are none who could teach, no initiates of the great
+and simple mysteries, no keepers of the faith. There are such, but they
+are muzzled, and the detestable horrors of civilisation go on in a
+community which calls itself after the name of Christ. And so long as we
+have in our schools this materialistic teaching, so long shall we raise
+up generation after generation to support that civilisation and to keep
+it the damnable thing we know.
+
+Talk goes on and goes on and goes on. There is talk now of a Great
+Measure for the Reform of National Education, much talk--there will be
+more. There will be much ink spilt, much breath wasted; we shall hear of
+Montessori and Froebel and Pestalozzi, of Science and the Classics, of
+opportunities of ladders of scholarships and prizes and endowments.
+
+We shall hear how hard it is that the sons of the plumber should not be
+able to go to Oxford and how desirable it is that daughters of the
+dustman should sometimes take the Prix de Rome.
+
+We shall be told how important are the telescope and the microscope, and
+how right it is that children should know all about their little
+insides. The one thing we shall not hear about will be the one thing
+needful.
+
+A tottering Government may keep itself in power by such a measure, a
+defeated party may, by it, bring itself back to office, but such a
+measure will not keep the nation from perdition, nor bring back the soul
+of a man into the true way.
+
+We may build up as we will schemes of Education and Instruction, add
+science to science, learning to learning, and facts to facts; but what
+we shall build will be only a dead body unless it be informed by the
+breath of the Spirit which maketh alive. For Education which teaches a
+man everything but how to live to the glory of God and the service of
+man is not Education, but only instruction; and it is the fruit of the
+tree, not of Life, but of Death.
+
+
+
+
+_PART II_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Romance in Games
+
+
+A SHARP distinction can be drawn between games with toys and games
+without them. In the latter the child's imagination has to supply
+everything, in the former it supplements or corrects the suggestion of
+the toy. But in both, as in every movement and desire of the natural
+child, it is imagination which tints the picture and makes the whole
+enterprise worth while.
+
+In hide-and-seek, that oldest of games, and still more in its sister "I
+spy," a little live streak of fear brought down from who knows what wild
+ancestry lends to the game an excitement not to be found in games with
+bats and balls and nets and bails and straightforward trappings bought
+at shops. When you lurk in the shrubbery ready to spring out on the one
+who is hunting you, and to become in your turn the hunter, you are no
+longer a child, you are a red Indian or a Canadian settler, or a tiger
+or a black-fellow, according to the measure of your dreams and the
+nature of the latest book of your reading.
+
+At this point it occurs to me that perhaps you who read may have
+forgotten the difference between "Hide-and-seek" and "I spy."
+Hide-and-seek is just what it says it is; half the players hide, and the
+others seek them and there's an end of it. It is an interesting game,
+but flat compared with "I spy." It has, however, this merit, that it can
+be played without those screams to which grown-ups are, usually, so
+averse. Whereas I defy any one to play "I spy" without screaming.
+Hide-and-seek is a calm game; the thing sought for might almost as well
+be an inanimate object: it is the game of stoats looking for pheasants'
+eggs, of bears looking for honey. But "I spy" is the game of enemy
+looking for enemy: it calls for the virtues of fortitude, endurance,
+courage--for the splendours of physical fitness, for aptness, for speed.
+In "I spy" half the players hide and the others seek; but they seek not
+an unresisting stationary object, but a keen, watchful retaliatory
+terror. They seek, in shrubbery and garden, behind summer-house and
+conservatory, in the shelter of tree, hedge, and arbour, for the enemy,
+and when that enemy is found the seeker does not just say, "Oh, here
+you are"--that ending the game. Far otherwise; the seeker in "I spy"
+goes warily, his heart in his mouth--for, the moment he sees a hider, he
+must shout "I spy," adding the hider's name. "I spy Jimmy!" he cries,
+and turning, flees at his best speed. The hidden one follows after--the
+hunted becoming in one swift terrible transition the hunter, and he who
+was the seeker flies with all the speed he may, across country, to the
+appointed "home." The quarry unearthed has become the pursuer and
+follows with yells. Grown-ups would always rather that you played
+hide-and-seek--and can you wonder? But sometimes they will concede to
+you "I spy" rights, and even join in the sport. It is always well, in
+playing any game where anything may be trampled, such as asparagus beds,
+or broken, such as windows, to have a grown-up or two on your side. And
+by "your," here, of course I mean children. The habit of years is not
+easily broken, and I am so much more used to writing _for_ children than
+_of_ them.
+
+Chevy Chase is a good old-fashioned game of courage and adventure. Does
+any one play it now? No child can play it _con amore_ who does not know
+who it was who
+
+    When his legs were smitten off
+    He fought upon his stumps,
+
+and to what bold heart the bitterest drop in the cup of defeat was "Earl
+Percy sees my face----"
+
+All wreathed with romance are the song-games, "Nuts in May," "There came
+Three Knights," and the rest, where the up-and-down dancing movement and
+the song of marriage-by-capture ends in a hard jolly tug-of-war, and woe
+to the vanquished! This is a very old game--and there are many words to
+it. One set I know, but I never have known the end. Little boys in light
+trousers and short jackets and little girls in narrow frilled gowns used
+to play it on the village green a hundred years ago. This is how it
+began:
+
+    Up and down the green grass
+      This and that and thus,
+    Come along, my pretty maid,
+      And take a walk with us;
+    You shall have a duck, my dear,
+      And you shall have a drake,
+    And you shall have a handsome man,
+      For your father's sake.
+
+My mother told me all of that song-game, and that is all of it that I
+can remember. She always said she would write it down, and I always
+thought there was plenty of time, and somehow there was not, and so I do
+not know the end. Perhaps Mr. Charles Marson, who first found out the
+Somerset folk-songs of which Mr. Somebody Else now so mysteriously gets
+all the credit, may know the end of these verses. If he does, and if he
+sees this, perhaps he will write and tell me.
+
+This game of come and go and give and take is alive in France; witness
+the old song:
+
+    Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
+    Qu'est-ce qui passe ici si tard
+        Toujours si gai?
+
+    Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine.
+    Ce sont les cavaliers du Roi
+        Toujours si gais.
+
+    Et que veulent ces cavaliers,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine?
+    Et que veulent ces cavaliers
+        Toujours si gais?
+
+    Des jeunes filles a marier,
+      Compagnons de la Marjolaine;
+    Des jeunes filles a marier,
+        Toujours si gais.
+
+And I have no doubt that stout Dutch children and German children with
+flaxen plaits, and small contadine, and Spanish and Swedish and Russian
+and Lithuanian babes all move rhythmically back and forth on their
+native greensward and rehearse the old story of the fair maid and the
+Knight "out to marry."
+
+The Mulberry Bush is another of the old song-games, where play-acting is
+the soul of the adventure, and this too is everywhere. "A la claire
+fontaine," I remember as the French version, danced on wet days in the
+cloisters of the convent of my youth. Le Pont d'Avignon, a glorious
+game, with its impersonations of animals, has, as far as I know, no
+counterpart in this country.
+
+All these games are active games: they can, of course, be played by
+sheer imitation, a sort of parrot-and-monkey aptitude will do it; but if
+they are to be enjoyed to the full, the imagination must have full play.
+To _be_ a knight a-riding to fetch a fair lady is quite simple, and
+quite thrilling--just as to be a bear demands nothing but growls and a
+plantigrade activity in the performer to be a fearful joy to the
+non-bear.
+
+Cricket and football, fives and racquets, the games that are played with
+things out of shops, do not need imagination to help them out. The games
+without bought accessories should perhaps rather be termed "plays" than
+games. And the more highly cultivated the imagination the more intensely
+joyous are the games. All sorts of acting, dressing-up, and pretending
+games depend entirely on the imagination, and it is well to encourage
+children to act scenes which they have observed, or heard about or read
+about. The smallest child will experience a real joy in putting its
+pinafore on wrong way round, call it a coat, and announce with pride
+that it is "Daddy going a tata."
+
+In the dolls' tea-parties you will observe a careful copy or travesty of
+your own "company manners," and as the small minds are filled with tales
+of wonder and adventure, you will find them re-enacted, the nursery
+rocking chair serving as charger for the gallant knight, and nurse's
+hassock taking quite adequately the part of the dragon. A small sister
+can generally be relied on to be the captive princess, especially if
+handsome trappings go with the part--and a cobweb brush is an admirable
+spear. The princess will be released from her bonds in time to act as
+chief mourner at the funeral of the slain hassock, which can be carried
+down the river in a barge made of the nursery table wrong way up--with
+the nursery tablecloth for a sail--an admirable tableau certain to occur
+if any one has told the children the story of Elaine. That the dragon
+should have as sumptuous a funeral as Enoch Arden himself, need not
+surprise you: a funeral is a funeral, be the corpse canary, guinea pig,
+or hassock, and to a dead dragon are due all the honours we pay to a
+gallant if unfortunate antagonist. Not only fairy tales, but history
+will be acted. You will have Jane as Queen Eleanor sucking the poison
+from Jack's grubby paws, and Alice as an Arab physician curing the
+plague, represented by blobs of paint-water on the rigid arms of Robert.
+How beloved will be the grown-up who, passing by the scene, shall
+refrain from commenting on the deafening groans of the patient, and
+shall, instead, offer the physician a ribbon for his girdle or a plume
+from the dusting brush for his turban.
+
+Exploring plays and all the plays which include wigwams and war paint
+are such as an intelligent grown-up will be able to intensify and add
+backbone to--for a child's fancy will naturally outrun his performance,
+and though he may imagine a feather head-dress or moccasins, he will be
+only too pleased that a grown-up should make the things for him with
+that strong, unerring touch to which his small experimenting hands
+cannot yet attain. All such games require numbers; your only lonely
+child cannot play Indians to the full. Two is better than one and more
+than two is better than two, up to the number of six or eight. People
+don't seem to see how important numbers are for play. They see it fast
+enough when it comes to schools, but a regular association of children
+for the purposes of play is not encouraged. In a large family of boys
+and girls it just happens happily, but an association of children from
+various homes generally means a predatory horde of boys: girls don't
+associate with unrelated girls in joyous play-adventures, and boys are
+apt to think that little girls who are not their sisters are either
+angels or muffs, and neither a muff nor an angel is what you want to
+play games with. Parents and guardians might do a great deal to render
+play-association possible: I suggest that house parties of children,
+where the utmost possible liberty should be given, would stimulate
+enormously the plays which encourage daring and initiative, and would
+teach boys that girls are not necessarily muffs or angels, and teach
+girls that boys are not all brutes.
+
+Fathers and mothers sacrifice themselves every year in August; you see
+them doing it, heavily, definitely, with clenched teeth and a grim
+determination not to be selfish, and to spend a month with the children
+at the seaside, however much it may cost in time, temper, and money. The
+Browns go to Scarborough, their friends the Robinsons go to Wales, the
+Smiths are in Devonshire and the Joneses at Littlehampton. They all go
+to the same sort of lodgings, do the same sort of things, and lucky is
+the mother whose nerves are not worn very thin indeed before the holiday
+ends. Now suppose all these worthy and self-sacrificing parents agreed
+to pool their families and let Mr. and Mrs. Brown take charge of them
+all--in some jolly big house suited to the needs of so swollen a
+household. Sixteen children are really, in many ways, four times easier
+to manage than four--and at least forty times as easy to amuse. In fact,
+you don't need to amuse them--they will amuse themselves and each other:
+Mr. and Mrs. Brown will only have to adjust ebullitions.
+
+Meanwhile the Smiths, Robinsons, and Joneses are having their holiday
+where they will. Their turn of having the children will come another
+year, when the Browns will be free to range the world in August, knowing
+that their children are safe and happy and are, thank you, having a much
+better time than they could have in small seaside lodgings, even with
+the undivided attention of their fathers and mothers. Besides, if I may
+for once take the part of the mothers instead of that of the children,
+what sort of holiday do you think the mother has, when to the ordinary
+routine of housekeeping at home are added the difficulties of
+housekeeping in unfamiliar surroundings, in a house of whose
+capabilities she has no experience, and with a landlady whose temper, as
+often as not, is as short as her tale of extras is long? The woman who
+works all the year round at the incredibly arduous task of making a
+home, answering week in and week out the constant, varying demands on
+all her complex mental and physical activities, does really deserve a
+real holiday. What is more, she needs it. She will be a better mother
+the rest of the year if she be allowed for that one month to be just a
+wife, and a wife on a holiday. The wife whose turn it is to take charge
+of the amalgamated families will find so great a change from the
+exclusive care of her own chickens that the change in itself will be a
+sort of holiday. And the children themselves, perhaps, will learn a
+little from the enforced separation from the fount of unselfish
+devotion, and appreciate their mother all the more if they have, be it
+only half-consciously, missed her a little even through the varied and
+joyous experiences of their month's house-party.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Building Cities
+
+
+THE devotion of aunts has often stirred my admiration. The heroism of
+aunts deserves an epic. But this is, as you say, not the place to write
+that epic. Give me leave, however, to say that of all the heroic acts of
+the devoted aunt, none seems to me more magnificent than the
+self-sacrifice which nerves those delightful ladies to settle themselves
+down to play, in cold blood, with their nephews and nieces games bought
+at a shop, games in boxes. I am not talking of croquet, or even
+badminton, though these may be, and are, bought in boxes at shops. Nor
+do I wish to depreciate chess and draughts, nor even halma, the poor
+relation of draughts and chess, nor dominoes, which we all love. These
+games, so precious on wet days, or when other people have headaches,
+cannot be too highly prized, too assiduously cultivated.
+
+The rigours of the seaside holiday, too often in wet weather a time of
+trial and temper, would be considerably mitigated if chess and
+chess-board, draughts, dominoes, and halma were packed in the trunks
+along with the serge suits, the sandshoes, and the sun-bonnets. The
+games which I do so 'wonder and admire' to see aunts playing are the
+meaningless games with counters and dice: ill-balanced dice and roughly
+turned counters and boards that look like folding chequer-boards till
+you open them, and then you find all the ugliest colours divided into
+squares and circles or slabs, with snakes or motors or some other
+unpleasing devices on them. These games are all exactly the same in
+their primary qualities: the first of them that was invented had all the
+faults of all its successors. Yet dozens of new ones are invented every
+year, just to sell, and helpless children try to play them, knowing no
+better, and angel aunts abet them, knowing all.
+
+Grown-ups suffer a great deal in playing with children: it is not the
+least charm of a magic city that a grown-up can play it and suffer
+nothing worse than the fatigue incidental to the bricklayer's calling.
+Of course, most grown-ups will say that they would rather be burnt at a
+slow fire, or play halma, than be bothered with magic cities. But that
+is only because they do not understand. Try the experiment the next
+time you are spending a wet week-end in a country house where there are
+children. Get the children to yourself and ask your hostess whether you
+may borrow what you want for a game. The library is the best place for
+building: there is almost certainly a large and steady table: also there
+are the books. I need not urge you to spare the elegantly bound volumes,
+and the prized first editions, and the priceless folios and duodecimos
+in their original calf and vellum. You will find plenty of books that
+nobody will mind your using--the old _Whitakers_, bound volumes of the
+_Cornhill_ and _Temple Bar_--good solid blocks for the foundations of
+your city. If there be a pair of candlesticks or an inkstand which
+match, you may make a magnificent archway by setting up the candlesticks
+as pillars and laying the inkstand on the top. You can see how this is
+done in the picture of the Elephant Temple. Get the children to bring
+down the bricks and enlist a friendly parlour-maid to let you have the
+run of the china cupboard, or a footman, if you are in that sort of
+house, to bring you the things you want on a tray.
+
+[Illustration: THE PALACE OF CATS.
+
+120]
+
+But it is much better if you can go alone over the house and choose what
+you really want. You invite the children to help you build, and to
+build themselves. If they have never built a magic city you will find
+that they will presently desert their plain brick edifices to watch the
+development of your palace or temple. They will offer suggestions, and
+quite soon they will offer objects. They will begin to look about the
+room with their sharp eyes--and about the house with their keen memory
+and imagination, and produce the sort of things that look like the sort
+of things they think you might like for your building. They will wander
+off, returning with needle-cases, little boxes, shells--and "Would this
+do for something?" is the word on every lip. They are soon as much
+absorbed in the building as you are--and I take it you are an
+enthusiast--and your magic city grows apace. Then after a little while a
+grown-up, bored and out of employment, will stray into the library with
+"Hullo! what are you kids up to with all this rubbish?" and stand with
+his hands in his pockets contemplating the building industry. If you
+answer him simply and kindly, and don't resent his choice of epithet, it
+is almost certain he will quite soon withdraw a hand from his pocket and
+reach out to touch your magic walls with "Wouldn't it be better like
+that?" Admit it, and in hardly any time at all you have him building on
+his own account. Another grown-up will stray in presently with the same
+question on his lips. He too will come to be bored and will remain to
+build, and by tea-time you will have collected every grown-up of the
+house-party--every grown-up, that is to say, with the right feeling for
+cities. It will surprise you to find how keen you will yourself become
+as the work goes on, and how it will call into play all your invention
+and your latent craftsmanship.
+
+You will be amazed at the results you can achieve with quite
+dull-looking materials, and still more will you be surprised at the
+increasing interest and skill of the grown-ups. When it is time to dress
+for dinner you will feel a pang of positive despair at the thought that
+your beautiful city, the child of your dreams and skill, must be taken
+down. It is like the end of the magic of Cinderella when her coach
+became a pumpkin, her horses mice and her coachman a fat rat. Now your
+domes are once more mere basins, your fountain basins are ash-trays,
+your fountains are but silver pen-cases and their gleaming waters only
+strips of the tin-foil that comes off chocolate or cigarettes. The walls
+of your palaces go back into the book-cases, and their facades return to
+the dull obscurity of the brick-boxes. The doors and the animals who
+stood on guard at the door-ways and terraces, on plinths or pillars,
+share in the dark rattling seclusion where many a wooden tail has been
+broken, many a painted ear lost for ever, but the tidying up has to be
+done: unless your hostess is one of those rare and delightful people who
+see what their guests like and lets them do it. In that case she may say
+"Oh! what a pity to disturb the pretty thing! Why not let your city
+stay for a day or two, so that the children can build some more to it
+to-morrow. No, of course it won't be in the way--and wouldn't it be
+pretty if we lighted it up with fairy lights after dark?"
+
+Then your city really has a chance. The children will think of it till
+bed-time and fall asleep in the happy throes of their first
+town-planning.
+
+You may think that I exaggerate the charms of magic cities, because I
+happened to invent them, and you may be afraid that my swan, if you ever
+make up your mind to adopt it, may turn out to be an ugly and
+dispiriting duckling. I assure you this is not so. I have never met a
+child who did not like building magic cities, and not many grown-ups. Of
+course the love of them grows, like other loves, and the longer you can
+keep the city standing, the fonder you and your playmates will get of
+it. It will grow more and more finished in detail, and the ugly
+make-shifts will be reorganised and made neat with an irreproachable
+neatness. If the magic city game were played in schools, as I think it
+ought to be, a long table--or series of tables--could easily be kept for
+it, and the city kept standing and be added to from day to day. But it
+will not be the same sort of city as the one you build in the house
+where the parlour-maid lives and still less the sort that happens in
+the house where there is a butler and many silver boxes and cups and
+candlesticks.
+
+Now I come to write all this down it seems very trivial, and it will
+perhaps seem even more so when I come to tell you about the different
+things we made and used for magic cities. But it is not really trivial.
+I do not think I claim for the magic city game more than it justifies,
+and I will tell you, presently, why I think this. Of course, when you
+have finished your city, if you ever do finish it, you make up stories
+about it, and always, even when you are building it, you imagine how
+splendid it would be if you were small enough to walk through the arches
+of your city gates, to run along the little corridors of your city
+palaces. Of course, it would do quite as well if your city became big
+enough for you to run about in while still keeping your natural
+size--but it is somehow not really so cosy to think of.
+
+When I had built my first three or four magic cities this idea of
+getting into the city--being, of course, correct citizen-size--lived
+with me so much that I wrote a story-book about it called _The Magic
+City_,[A] in which a boy and girl do really become the right size and
+enter into the city they have built. They have there all the adventures
+whose wraiths danced before me when I was building courts and making
+palm trees and finding out the many fine and fair uses of cowries and
+fir-cones.
+
+This book, _The Magic City_, produced a curious effect. I hope I shall
+not look conceited (because really I am only proud) when I say that
+about my books I have had the dearest letters from children, saying
+pretty things about the stories in the prettiest way. It is one of the
+most heart-warming things in the world to get these letters and to
+answer them. And if I had letters like these I should have been only
+pleased and not disturbed. But the letters about the Magic City, though
+they were full of the pretty, awkward, delicious things that children
+write to the author of the books they like, held something else--a
+demand, severe and almost unanimous, to know how magic cities were
+built, and whether "children like us" could build one, and, if so, how?
+I got so many of these letters that I decided to build a magic city
+where any child, in London at any rate, could come and see it. And I
+built it at the Children's Welfare Exhibition which the _Daily News_
+arranged last year at Olympia. The history of that building would make
+a largish and intimate volume. The difficulties that beset a
+home-dweller when she goes out into the world, the anguish of
+misunderstandings which arise between the builder of magic cities and
+the people who lay linoleum and put up electric lights, the confusion
+which results from having packed in boxes and all mixed up the building
+materials which you are accustomed to look for as you need them in your
+own home, the extraordinary mass of people, the extraordinary kindness
+of people; for after all, it is the kindness which stands out. It is
+true that the gentleman who, very much isolated, fixed the electric
+lights, behaved exactly like an earthquake, upsetting two temples, a
+palace, and a tank with an educated seal in it. But then how more than a
+brother was the man who did the whitewash! It is true that the dictator
+with the linoleum--but I will not remember these things. Let me remember
+how many good friends I found among the keepers of the stalls, how a
+great personage of the _Daily News_ came with his wife at the last
+despairing moment, and lent me the golden and ruby lamps from their
+dining-table, how the Boy Scouts "put themselves in four" to get me some
+cocoa-nuts for roofs of cottages, how their Scout Master gave me
+fourteen beautiful little ivory fishes with black eyes, to put in my
+silver paper ponds, how the basket-makers on the one side and the home
+hobbies on the other were to me as brothers, how the Cherry Blossom Boot
+Polish lady gave me hairpins and the wardens of Messrs. W. H. Smith's
+bookstall gave me friendship, how the gifted boy-sculptor for the
+Plasticine stall, moved by sheer loving-kindness, rushed over one day
+and dumped a gorgeous prehistoric beast, modelled by his own hands, in
+the sands about my Siberian tomb, how the Queen of Portugal came and
+talked to me for half an hour in the most flattering French, while the
+Deity from the _Daily News_ looked on benign.
+
+These are things I can never forget. When the show opened I was feeling
+like a snail who has inadvertently come out without his shell. Think how
+all this kindness comforted and protected me. And then came the long
+stream of visitors--crowds of them--I don't know how many thousands, who
+came and looked at my magic city and asked questions, and looked and
+looked at it, looked and said things. It is because of what they said
+that I am writing about that show at all. They all liked the city except
+two, and I cannot think that those two were, in other respects, really
+nice people. And more than half of them asked whether I would not write
+a book about the magic city which I had built there, and which lay
+looking so real and romantic under the soft glow of the tinted lamps:
+not a story-book, but a book to tell other people how to make such
+cities. And I said I would tell all I knew in a book. And when I came to
+write I found that there were many other things that I wanted to write
+about children, and other things than magic cities, and I wrote them,
+and this is the book.
+
+And the reason I am telling you all this is that my big magic city at
+Olympia showed me, more than anything else could have done, that the
+building of magic cities interests practically every one, young or old.
+
+It is very difficult to say all this and yet not to feel that you will
+think that I am boasting about my magic city. But I want you to believe
+that it was very beautiful, and that you can build one just as beautiful
+or much more beautiful if you care to try it. It is such an easy game.
+Every one can play it. And every one likes it--even quite old people. By
+the way, I have been asked to build another city at Olympia in April,
+and I hope that it will be a prettier one even than the other which I
+loved so.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] Macmillans.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Bricks--and Other Things
+
+
+IT is a mistake when you are going to build a city to make too large a
+collection of building materials before you begin to build. If it is
+natural to you to express yourself by pencil lines on paper you might
+perhaps draw an outline of the masses of your city as you see them in
+the architect's vision or illumination which should precede all
+building, either of magic cities or municipal cab-shelters. Having
+roughly indicated on paper the general shape of your city as you look at
+it from the front--the shape it would have against the western sky at
+dusk (I think architects call this the elevation, don't they?)--you
+proceed to collect such material as will roughly indicate that shape on
+the table or other building-place. And here let me once more warn the
+builder new to his business not to be trapped by the splendid obvious
+bait of floor's wide space. To build palaces while prone on the stomach
+may be natural and easy to extreme youth. To grown-up people it is
+agonising and impossible. The floor has only two qualifications as a
+building site. It is large--larger at least than any of the pieces of
+furniture which stand on it--and it is flat. And when you have said that
+you have said all. Whereas the inconveniences of the floor as a place
+for building are innumerable. The floor is draughty, it is inaccessible,
+except from the attitude of the serpent, and the serpent's attitude,
+even if rich in a certain lax comfort, is most unfavourable for the
+steady use of both hands. If you want to see how unfavourable assume
+that attitude and try to build a card-house on the floor. You cannot do
+it. If you kneel--well, you know how hard the floor gets if you kneel on
+it for quite a little time; if you sit or squat your dress or your
+coat-tails insist on playing at earthquakes with your building. Also the
+city on the floor is liable to hostile invasion by cats or dogs or
+servants: to the crushing and scattering by short-sighted outsiders or
+people who rush into the room to look for something in a hurry. Think of
+a playful elephant in some Eastern court of carved pearl and ivory
+lattice; an elephant co-inciding with one of the more fanciful volcanic
+eruptions, and your conception will pale into placidity in the face of
+the spectacle of a normal puppy in a floor-built city. And on the floor
+things not only get broken, they get lost. Cotton reels roll under
+sofas, draughts bowl away into obscurity and are only found next day by
+the housemaid when she moves the fender, and not then, as often as not;
+chess kings are walked on and get their crowns chipped; card counters
+disappear for ever, and it is quite impossible for you to keep an eye on
+your materials when you are grovelling among them. Therefore build on a
+table--or tables. Tables of different shapes, heights, and sizes make
+beautiful sites for cities. And bureaux are good, if you may take the
+drawers out and empty the pigeon-holes. I remember a wonderful city we
+made once: it was called the "City of the Thousand Lights," and it was
+built on a bureau, two large tables and three other smaller ones, all
+connected by bridges in the handsomest way. (The lids of the brick boxes
+make excellent bridges and you can adorn them to your fancy, and make
+impressive gate-houses at each end.) The bureau was the Temple of Mung,
+and we sacrificed a pale pink animal from the Noah's Ark at the shrine
+of this, the most mysterious of the Gods of Pegana. The thousand
+lights--there were not a thousand, really, but there were many luminous
+towers, with windows of a still brighter glow. You make them by putting
+a night-light in a tumbler--a little water first by way of fire
+insurance--and surrounding the tumbler by a sheet of paper with windows
+and battlements and fixed to a cylindrical shape by pins. The paper
+cylinders are, of course, fitted on outside the tumblers so that there
+is no danger of fire. All the same it is better to let a grown-up do the
+luminous towers.
+
+[Illustration: GUARDED ARCH.]
+
+Having chosen your site and blocked out the mass of your buildings, you
+begin to collect the building material. For my own part I see the city I
+am going to build in the eye of the mind--or of the heart--so vividly
+and consistently that I never need to make notes of it on paper. I know
+when what I am building is not in accord with the vision, and then I
+pull it down. Truly in accord it never really is, but it approximates.
+
+Now when you have seen the silhouette of your city and begin to look for
+stuff to build with, you will instantly find that everything you can lay
+your hands on is too small. The bricks, even the boxes which contained
+them, are suited for the detailed building which is to come later, but
+now you want something at once bigger and less conventionally
+proportioned. Now is the time to look for boxes--not the carved
+sandal-wood boxes in which aunts keep their pins, nor the smooth
+cedarwood boxes in which uncles buy their cigars, though both these are
+excellent when you come to the details of your work, but for the mass
+you want real big boxes; if you have a large table, or tables, Tate's
+sugar boxes are not too large. Also there are the boxes in which starch
+is packed, and cocoa, and the flatter boxes which the lady at the
+sweet-shop will give you if she likes you, and sell to you for a penny
+anyhow. The boxes in which your father gets his collars, and the boxes
+in which your mother gets her chocolates, though not really large,
+should be collected at the same time, because they need the same
+treatment. I am assuming now that you are not building a city for an
+afternoon's amusement, but one for which you have found a safe resting
+place--a city that may take days to build and will not be disturbed for
+days. If you can once found your city in a safe place, and you are
+working at it day after day, you will go on thinking of more and more
+things to be added to it, and it will grow in beauty under your hands as
+naturally as a flower under the hand of summer.
+
+[Illustration: BOXES.]
+
+You have now your collection of boxes--but they are of plain, rough
+wood, and probably disfigured by coarse coloured printed papers telling
+what the boxes once held. These papers you wash off, and when the boxes
+are clean and dry, you paint or colour-wash them to suit your
+requirements. Now your requirements are large blocks of colours to match
+your bricks, and bricks are of three colours--white, terra-cotta, and
+stone colour.
+
+The stone bricks are stone colour and terra-cotta--oak bricks are very
+nearly stone colour--and there are white-wood bricks. To these three I
+would add a dark brown; and as this dark brown is not sold in boxes at
+the shops, you had better colour some of your bricks with it for
+yourself. Dark wood in a city gives a wonderful richness and helps the
+lighter colours more than you would think possible. A city in which some
+buildings are of dark wood will have an air of reality never achieved by
+a city where all is red or white or stone colour. By the way, among the
+stone bricks there are some blue ones, but you will always have enough
+of them, for they are the last things you will ever want to use.
+
+Your boxes then must be coloured either white, red, stone colour, or
+dark brown. In the white use either white paint--flat, not shining, or
+if that cost too much trouble and money, whitewash made of whitening,
+size, hot water and a pinch of yellow ochre or chrome powder to give it
+a pleasant ivory creaminess. There should be a good deal of size so that
+the whitewash does not come off on every thing.
+
+The red boxes can be painted to match the red bricks, or colour-washed
+(whitewash as before, but red ochre for colour).
+
+Stone colour is not a very satisfactory tint and too much of it makes
+for gloom. The lids and bottoms of the brick boxes will generally give
+you as much of it as you want. But if you desire stone colour you can
+make it by putting a pinch of raw umber in the whitewash. Or you can
+paint your boxes with this uninteresting tint--resembling the doors of
+back kitchens. With these paints or colour-washes you can make your odd
+many-shaped boxes into smooth-surfaced blocks to match your bricks: and
+not only wooden, but cardboard boxes can be treated in this way. All
+these colours can be bought in gigantic penn'orths at the oil-shops. But
+when I come to the dark brown, which I confess is my favourite colour,
+no cardboard box will serve your turn. You must choose clean, smooth
+wood, because the brown colouring is transparent, and the grain will
+show through. Your bricks will be smooth enough, and if the boxes are
+not smooth a little sand-paper will soon subdue their rough exterior. I
+suppose you know how to use sand-paper? If you just rub with your
+fingers you hurt your fingers and don't make much progress; the best way
+is to wrap the sand-paper round a flat piece of wood--a wooden brick
+will do--and rub with that.
+
+When your wood is all smooth you mix your stain. And here I make a
+present to all housewives of the best floor stain in the world. Get a
+tin of Brunswick black--the kind you put on stoves--and some turpentine.
+Mix a little of the black and a little of the turpentine in a pot and
+try it on the wood with a smooth brush--a flat brush is the best--till
+you have the colour you want, always remembering that it will be a
+little lighter when it is dry. When you have decided on the colour,
+paint your bricks and boxes on five out of their six sides lightly and
+smoothly, keeping to the grain of the wood, and not going over the same
+surface twice if you can help it. This is why a flat brush is the best:
+it will go right down the side of a brick and colour it at one sweep.
+Then stand each brick up on end to dry. When it is dry you can paint the
+under bit on which it has been standing. While you have stains and
+colours going it is well to colour some of your arches, and also such
+things as cotton-reels, and the little wooden pill-boxes that you get at
+the chemist's. Before colouring these boxes fill them with sand or
+stones and stick the lids on with glue. Otherwise they will not be heavy
+enough to build with happily.
+
+This painting or colouring should be done out of doors, or in an
+out-house, if possible. If you have to do it in the house spread several
+thicknesses of newspaper before you begin, and make a calm resting place
+for your painted things where they can dry at leisure and not be
+scarred with the finger-marks of her who "clears away."
+
+The earnest builder will keep a watchful eye on any carpentering that
+may go on in the house, and annex the smaller blocks of wood cut off the
+end of things, which, to an alien eye, are so much rubbish, but which
+are to the builder stores of price.
+
+If there are a few shillings to spare, the carpenter will, for those few
+shillings, cut you certain shapes which you cannot buy in shops--arches
+of a comfortable thickness and of satisfying curves, and slabs of board
+for building steps. These should be of varying lengths and thicknesses
+and made in sets of twelve steps, with two boards to each step,
+twenty-four slabs to a set. The biggest might be 1 in. thick and the
+bottom and largest slabs 12 by 6 in., lessening to 6 by 1 in. The next
+set might be 3/4 in., and of corresponding proportions, then 1/2 in., then 1/4
+in. The two basic slabs of the 3/4 in. would be 9 by 4-1/2 in., and those of
+the 1/2 in. would be 6 by 3 in. A set with 1/4 in. steps (the basic slabs 3
+by 1-1/2 in.) would complete the set. Flights of steps of many varying
+heights and sizes could be built with these slabs. Ask the carpenter--if
+the shillings are forthcoming--to save for you the curved pieces of
+wood which come out of the arches. They are very useful for the bases
+of pillars, for towers and for the pedestals of statues or vases. Some
+of the arches, steps, and blocks should be coloured to match the red,
+white, and brown bricks.
+
+[Illustration: ARCHES AND PILLARS.]
+
+Some of the boxes, particularly the larger ones, should have doorways
+sawn in them on opposite sides--it is pleasant to look _through_ a
+building and see the light beyond; and if you are a thorough builder you
+can make a pillared interior which will delight the eyes of those who
+stoop down and peer through the doorway. A few narrow, oblong windows,
+high up, will also be useful. You need not show them unless you wish:
+you can always conceal them by a facade of bricks.
+
+[Illustration: PILLARED COURT.]
+
+Another pleasant use of a big box is to cut out the top and sides and
+make a columned court of it, which, when cream-washed, dignifies your
+city with almost all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was
+Rome. The columns are cut from broom-handles--twopence each at the
+oil-shop, or, in the case of smaller boxes, from those nice round smooth
+wooden sticks which cost a penny and are used in ordinary life to thread
+window-blinds on.
+
+If you are going to make a city which is to stand for some time, a
+little thin glue is a good help to stability. If it is only a
+here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow city, Plasticine is good--the least touch
+of it seeming to make things safe which otherwise might totter to their
+ruin. But except as mortar Plasticine should be shunned. It is not good
+as a building material.
+
+Having now your bricks, boxes, arches, steps, and rounds, you may begin
+to block out your building. Quite soon you will begin to find that
+everything is too rectilinear. Even the arches and the rounds and the
+pillars and the pill-boxes cannot satisfy your desire for curves. This
+is the moment when you will begin to look about you for domes. And the
+domes, on the instant of their imposition in your building, will call
+out for minarets. It is then that you will wander about the house
+seeking eagerly for things that are like other things. Your search will
+be magnificently successful, if only the lady of the house has given you
+a free hand, and you have been so fortunate as to secure the sympathies
+of the kitchen queen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The Magic City
+
+
+THE only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after
+all, the best magic in the world. The idea of it came to me when I was
+dissatisfied with the materials provided for children to build with, and
+I think it must be a really true idea, because wherever I have applied
+it, it has worked, and that, I am told, is in accordance with the
+philosophy of pragmatism and a characteristic of all great discoveries.
+You may build magic cities in homes of modest comfort, using all the
+pretty things you can lay your hands on. You may build them in the
+mansions of the rich, if the rich are nice people and love cities, and
+if the butler will let you have the silver candlesticks for pillars, and
+the silver-gilt rose-bowls for domes; and you could build one in the
+houses of the very poor, if the very poor had any space for
+building--build them there and not use a single thing that could not be
+begged or borrowed by an intelligent child, no matter how poor.
+
+Children love to build. I still think with fond affection, and I am
+afraid speak with tiresome repetition, of those big oak bricks which we
+had when we were children. They disappeared when we left the old London
+house where I was born. It was in Kennington, that house--and it had a
+big garden and a meadow and a cottage and a laundry, stables and
+cow-house and pig-styes, elm-trees and vines, tiger lilies and flags in
+the garden, and chrysanthemums that smelt like earth and hyacinths that
+smelt like heaven. Our nursery was at the top of the house, a big room
+with a pillar in the middle to support the roof. "The post," we called
+it: it was excellent for playing mulberry bush, or for being martyrs at.
+The skipping rope did to bind the martyrs to the stake. When we left
+that house we went to Brighton, where there was a small and gritty
+garden, where nothing grew but geraniums and calceolarias. And we did
+not have our bricks any more. Perhaps they were too heavy to move.
+Perhaps the Brighton house was too small for the chest. I think I must
+have clamoured for the old bricks, for I remember very well the advent
+of a small box of deal bricks made in Germany, which had indeed two
+arches and four pillars, and a square of glass framed in wood daubed
+with heavy, ugly body colour, and called a window. But you could not
+build with those bricks. So there was no building at Brighton except on
+the beach. Sand is as good as anything in the world to build with--but
+there is no sand on the beach at Brighton, only sandiness. There are
+stones--pebbles you call them, but they are too round to be piled up
+into buildings. The only thing you can play with them is dolls' dinner
+parties. There are plenty of oyster shells and flat bits of slate and
+tile for dishes and plates--and it is quite easy to find stones the
+proper shape and colour for boiled fowls and hams and roast legs of
+mutton, German sausages, ribs of beef, mince pies, pork pies, roast hare
+or calf's head. But building is impossible.
+
+In the courtyard of our house in France there was an out-house with a
+sloping roof and a flat parapet about four feet high. We used to build
+little clay huts along this, and roof them with slates, leaving a hole
+for a chimney. The huts had holes for windows and doors, and we used to
+collect bits of candle and put them in our huts after dark and enjoy the
+lovely spectacle of our illuminated buildings till some one remembered
+us and caught us, and sent us to bed. That was the curse of our
+hut-building--the very splendour of the result attracted the attention
+one most wished to avoid. But clay was our only building material, and
+after the big bricks were lost I never had any more bricks till I had
+children of my own who had bricks of their own. And then I played with
+them and theirs. And even then I never thought of building magic cities
+till the Indian soldiers came.
+
+They were very fine soldiers with turbans and swords and eyes that
+gleamed in quite a lifelike way, riding on horses of a violently active
+appearance: they came to my little son when he was getting well after
+measles or some such sorrow, and he wanted a fort built for them. So we
+rattled all the bricks out of their boxes on to the long cutting-out
+table in the work-room and began to build. But do what we would our fort
+would not look like a fort--at any rate not like an Eastern fort. We
+pulled it down and tried again, and then again, but no: regardless of
+our patient energy our fort quietly but persistently refused to look
+like anything but a factory--a building wholly unworthy of those
+military heroes with the prancing steeds and the coloured turbans, and
+the eyes with so much white in them. So then I wondered what was needed
+to give a hint of the gorgeous East to the fort, and I perceived that
+what was wanted was a dome--domes.
+
+So I fetched some brass finger-bowls and lustre basins off the dresser
+in the dining-room and inverted one on the chief tower of our fort, and
+behold! the East began to sparkle and beckon. Domes called for minarets,
+and chessmen on pillars supplied the need. One thing led to another, and
+before the day was over the Indian horsemen were in full charge across a
+sanded plain where palm trees grew--a sanded plain bounded only by the
+edges of the table, along three sides of which were buildings that never
+rose beside the banks of Thames, but seemed quite suitable piles to
+reflect their fair proportions in the Ganges or the Sutlej, especially
+when viewed by eyes which had not had the privilege of gazing on those
+fair and distant streams.
+
+I learned a great deal in that my first day of what I may term romantic
+building, but what I learned was the merest shadow-sketch of the
+possibilities of my discovery. My little son, for his part, learned that
+a bowl one way up is a bowl, a thing for a little boy to eat bread and
+milk out of; the other way up it is a dome for a king's palace. That
+books are not only things to read, but that they will make marble slabs
+for the building of temples. That chessmen are not only useful for
+playing that difficult and tedious game on which grown-ups are so slowly
+and silently intent, or even for playing all those other games, of
+soldiers, which will naturally occur to any one with command of the
+pleasant turned pieces. Chessmen, he learned, had other and less simple
+uses. As minarets of delicate carved work they lightened the mass of
+buildings and conferred elegance and distinction, converting what had
+been a block of bricks into a pavilion for a sultan or a tomb for a
+sultan's bride.
+
+[Illustration: MATERIALS FOR THE GUARD-ROOM.]
+
+There was a little guard-room, I remember, at the corner of our first
+city, and there has been a little guard-room at the corner of every city
+we have built since. In simple beauty, that little guard-room seemed to
+us then to touch perfection. And really, you know, I have not yet been
+able to improve on it. The material was simplicity itself: six books,
+five chessmen, and a basin; and you see here how the guard-room looked
+when it was done.
+
+[Illustration: THE GUARD-ROOM.]
+
+[Illustration: THE DOMINO DOOR.]
+
+There was a black box, I remember, standing on another box, with domino
+steps. It needed a door, and we made it a door of ivory with the double
+blank of the dominoes, and a portico of three cigarettes--two for
+pillars and one to lie on the top of the pillars and complete the
+portico. You have no idea how fine the whole thing looked--like a
+strong little house of ebony and ivory--a little sombre in appearance
+perhaps, and like a house that has a secret to keep, but quite fine. The
+palm trees we made out of pieces of larch and yew fastened by Plasticine
+to the tops of elder twigs--and elder twigs have a graceful carriage,
+not too upright and yet not drooping. They look very like the trunks of
+tropical trees. But if you have not elders and larches and yew trees to
+command, you can make trees for your city in other ways. For little
+trees in tubs we had southernwood stuck in cotton reels--these make
+enchanting tubs, and there are a good many different shapes, so that
+your flower tubs are pleasantly varied. Fir cones we found useful, too;
+they made magnificent _chevaux de frise_.
+
+[Illustration: LARCH PALM.]
+
+[Illustration: THE MAGIC CITY.
+
+152]]
+
+On the first day of building what we soon came to call magic cities we
+trusted to inspiration; there was no time for thought. And this day was
+perhaps the most interesting day of all--for we had everything to learn.
+One of the things which I learned was that this magic city game was an
+excellent training for eye and hand, as well as for the imagination and
+the more soothing of the domestic virtues. The eye is trained to
+perceive likenesses and differences in the shapes and colours of
+things--to notice, as I said, that a bowl is a dome wrong way up, and
+that cigarettes are like white pillars. A beautiful yet sinister temple
+might be built with cigars for pillars and cigar-boxes for pediments,
+if cigars were the sort of things you were ever allowed to play with.
+You see that yew and larch and elder can be made to look like palm
+trees, and that shrubs in tubs are really like sprigs of southernwood in
+cotton reels. You go about with eyes newly opened to form and colour:
+you look at every object in a new light, trying to see whether it is or
+is not like something else--something that can be used in your magic
+city. You notice that a door is much the same shape as auntie's
+mother-of-pearl card-case, and your architectural instinct, already
+beginning to develop, assures you that a pearly door would be a
+beautiful thing for a temple, if only auntie sees things in the same
+light as you do. You perceive that a cribbage board is straight and
+narrow, as a path leading to such a door might be, and that if you stick
+tiny tufts of southernwood or veronica into the holes along the ivory
+sides of your path, your path will run between two little green hedges.
+You will notice that books make colonnades darkly mysterious if the lids
+of the brick boxes are laid along the back and along the top, and that
+based on these solidly built colonnades your bricks and arches will rise
+in galleries of unexpected dignity and charm. The building itself, the
+placing of bricks and dominoes, and books and chessmen and bowls, with
+exactness and neatness, is in itself a lesson in firm and delicate
+handling, such a lesson as is impossible if you are building with bricks
+alone. The call on the imagination is strong and clear. A house--the
+meanest hut--cannot be built without a plan or without an architect,
+though the architect may be only a little child and the plan may be only
+a little child's dream. To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on
+another, to make a cairn, not a house. The plan for the magic city,
+then, gets itself dreamed--the child's imagination learns to know what
+the bowl will look like when it is upside down, and, presently, what
+sort of bowls and books and bricks are needed to give to the
+cloud-capped palace of its desire some shadow in solid fact perceptible
+to the senses. To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the
+despair of every artist. And even though the image be distorted--as in
+all works of art, even the greatest, it always must be--yet it is joy
+even to have created the poorest image of a dream.
+
+And in the labour of creation will blossom those domestic virtues which
+best adorn the home; patience--for it is not often that for the young
+architect dream and image even vaguely coincide at the first effort, or
+the second or the third; good temper, for no one can build anything in a
+rage. The spirit of anger is the enemy of the spirit of architecture.
+And besides, being angry may make your hand shake, and then nothing is
+any good. Perseverance too, without which patience is a mere passive
+endurance. All these grow strong while you build your cities and try to
+make visible your dream.
+
+I do not mean that a child building a city sees all of it at once--in
+every detail; I don't suppose even the heaviest of architects does that.
+But I mean that he sees the masses of it with the eye of the mind and
+arrives by experiment at the details that best suit those masses. If the
+glass ash-tray will not do, the tea-cup without a handle will--or
+perhaps the flower-pot saucer, or the lid of a cocoa-tin. . . . One must
+look about, and find something that _will_ do, something which when it
+is put in its place will seem the only possible thing. I don't know how
+real architects work, but this is how you work with magic cities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Materials
+
+
+YOU wander round the house seeking beautiful things which look like
+other beautiful things. Let us suppose that you have the run of a house
+where beautiful things are. I will tell you afterwards what to do in the
+house where beautiful--or at any rate costly--things are not. It is best
+when the owner of the house is an enthusiastic member of the building
+party; then she will grudge nothing.
+
+In the drawing-room you will find silver candlesticks and a silver
+inkstand. The candlesticks are like pillars. Put the inkstand across the
+pillars and you have a gateway of unexampled splendour. If there be a
+silver-backed blotting-book, take it. It will make the great door of
+your greatest temple. Silver bowls should not be passed by, nor bronzes.
+A vase of Japanese bronze set up between two ebony elephants crowns a
+flat pillared building with splendour. There may be Chinese dragons or
+Egyptian gods that have lain a thousand years safe in their bronze amid
+the sands of the desert, cast aside by the foot of the camel, unseen in
+the shadow of the tent, and now decking the mantelpiece of the room you
+are looting. Little silver figures of knights in armour and what
+not--take them if you get the chance. Chessmen, too, as many as you can
+get, the carved ivory ones, of red and white, and the black and brown
+kind where the heads of the kings and queens are so like marbles and
+those of the pawns like boot-buttons; draughts too, and spillikins, and
+those little metal animals, heavy and coloured life-like, which you see
+on glass shelves in the fancy shop: take them too. They will serve other
+uses than those to which you will dedicate your Noah's Ark animals. Card
+counters, especially the golden and mother-of-pearl kinds, and dominoes,
+and the willow-pattern pots and a blue cup or so from the glass-fronted
+cupboard. Take all these, always giving preference to the things that
+you will not be asked to put back the same day. Little Japanese
+cabinets, tea-caddies of tortoiseshell or wood or silver, silver
+boxes--and boxes of all beautiful kinds. Do not take the playing cards
+that people play bridge with: these are never quite the same after they
+have been used in magic cities, and the Queen of Hearts always gets
+lost. You can usually acquire odd packs of cards that nobody wants.
+Those with black and gold backs are the best. They make gorgeous
+pagodas, and a touch of Plasticine keeps each card where it should be.
+
+In the dining-room you may acquire perhaps, at least you can in mine,
+brass finger-bowls, and the lids of urns and kettles from the
+dresser--egg-cups and mugs and basins of lustre and of blue. Also those
+very little pewter liqueur-cups from Liberty's, and the tumblers for
+your towers of light, if you are going to have any. The library will
+yield you books and atlases--very useful for roofs these last, if they
+do not slope too much from back to edge; if they do, you can get even
+with them by wedges of paper laid in on the thin side.
+
+But the kitchen will be your happiest hunting-ground, and here you will
+make a good bag even in those houses where you are not allowed any of
+the treasures from the drawing-room or the dining-room.
+
+Tins--tins of all kinds and shapes, from the tin that once held Bath
+Olivers and its lesser brother where coffee once lived to the square
+smaller tins designed for cocoa, mustard, pepper, and so forth.
+
+[Illustration: HONESTY PILLARS.]
+
+A flour-dredger and a pepper-pot, a potato-cutter, patty pans, and those
+little tall tins that you bake castle puddings in, the round wooden
+moulds with which dairy-maids imprint cows and swans upon pats of
+butter, the kitchen mortar, especially the big marble one, so heavy that
+cook does not care to use it, brown earthenware bowls and stewing-pots,
+the lids of tea-pots, clothes-pegs, jars that have held ginger, and jars
+that have held jam--especially the brownish corrugated kind of jar--all
+these things and many more you may glean in a kitchen whose Queen is
+kind.
+
+One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever made was built of
+kitchen things, and bricks and the boxes of bricks, a few shells, and a
+few chessmen.
+
+The three tall towers are two cocoa tins and a Bath Oliver tin, very
+brightly polished; the windows and doors and crenellations are of black
+_passe-partout_, that nice gummed paper which you buy in reels for
+binding pictures and glass together when you don't want to have
+picture-frames. On the tops of the tins are the lids of a silver urn, a
+silver butter dish, and a silver jam-jar. A salt-cellar (wrong way up,
+with a white chess knight on it) and a pepper-pot with _passe-partout_
+doors and windows stand at the base of the tower, and turrets are made
+of round bricks and draughts, with the chess castles on the top. The
+porch is a big potato-cutter, with a white chess king on it, and on each
+side two books with a binding of white and pale gold. Along the top of
+the porch run the lids of two domino-boxes; on these are two rounds that
+happened when the arches were being cut out. On these little pearl
+shells are glued, and little roofs of blue tiles complete the porch.
+Behind these more books, white and pale gold with marbled sides, lead up
+to the platform on which the great tin towers rise up against the snowy
+background (linen sheets over the backs of chairs). The lower building
+is of the boxes of bricks faced with bricks and bearing a large blue jar
+crowned with a silver egg-cup, a flour-dredger, and a pepper-pot, and
+some blue and white tiles. An Egyptian god stands at the corner of the
+upper and the lower building, and two green trees with white roses grow
+out of a tomb at the left. The pathway is of tiles edged with fir cones,
+and two rose-trees within tubs (cotton reels) stand at its beginning;
+the whole thing was blue and silver and black, and I wish I could show
+you a coloured picture of it, or, better still, build the thing up for
+you to see.
+
+The lower platform on the right is a box faced with silver seed-vessels
+of honesty, and the arches and court are red. The steps are made of
+blocks of sugar. The tank is edged with red bricks and the water where
+the seal swims is silver paper. In front is a pavement made of
+mother-of-pearl card counters, and the inside of the court is made of
+one large red tile with a pattern of white on it. (You can do this with
+a square board painted red, and counters laid on it.) The fountain in
+the middle is a brass match-box and the waters that rise from it are
+silver paper; but in the picture the water of the fountain seems to
+have been blown aside by the wind, which no doubt is severe in "those
+desolate regions of snow." You can build just such another tower and
+castle with the things you have, but when once you start building you
+will most likely think of some other way, quite different from mine, and
+just as good.
+
+Tiles, by the way, are most useful, and if you have an uncle who is an
+architect he will have any number sent to him as samples, and he will be
+rather glad to get rid of them. If your uncles are all eminent in other
+walks of life it is a pity, but you are probably friends with the man
+who papers and paints your house, or the man who comes when the pipes
+burst at Christmas, or the man who comes about the gas, or the man who
+knows all the sullen secrets of the kitchen range. It will be strange if
+none of these can get you a few coloured tiles when once they know you
+want them. It is well, if you are a child with a taste for building, to
+take pains to become acquainted with all the men who come to your house
+to do interesting things with tools and wood and iron and lead. Quite
+apart from the joy of watching their slow and mysterious processes, and
+thinking how easy it would be to be a plumber or a paperhanger yourself,
+there are all sorts of things left over from their work which are of no
+use to them, but may be of much use to you. All sorts of screws and
+nails, for instance, these generous men will now and then bestow--little
+screws of dry colour, little pieces of brass, door-knobs and
+finger-plates, thick red earthenware pipe, good for towers, lengths of
+pleasantly coloured wall-paper--the wrong side of which, being plain,
+can be used for all sorts of purposes. Lead piping is useful too,
+especially if you get it cut into 2-in. lengths--and cut _straight_. The
+sections make excellent and stable flower-pots for cities. Bits of brass
+tubing are useful too--in fact, brass objects of all sorts deserve your
+careful consideration. Because, if a city is to look handsome, it must
+have a good deal of metal about it, as the cities in Atlantis did.
+
+As I write I see more and more clearly that a sharp distinction must be
+drawn between cities built and demolished in an afternoon, and cities
+that can be kept going and added to day by day for weeks. You may often
+be fortunate enough to raid drawing-room and dining-room and to use the
+spoils for a building that only lasts a day, but no one will strip her
+rooms of all the pretty things you want and let you keep them for weeks.
+Therefore if you are going to build a city that is to go on, you must
+collect the materials of your own, and the odds and ends that amiable
+workmen will readily give you will take a useful place in your
+collection. If you let it be known that you want odds and ends of pretty
+and simple shapes, your friends will save them for you, and you will
+gradually amass the things you need. I know well enough that there will
+have to be a place to keep them, but the toy-cupboard, if you clear out
+all the toys you never play with, will hold a good deal, and many of the
+things you collect will do for other purposes as well as for the
+building of cities.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Collections
+
+
+[Illustration: TREES.]
+
+FIRST in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps
+of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably
+have. Odd chessmen--quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few
+pence--are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men
+are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and
+nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Glass drops off
+old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for
+grass plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very
+realistic grass lawns can be made by chopping up the long green grass
+that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up,
+and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you
+have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it
+all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you
+sprinkle your chopped grass thickly all over it and leave it to dry.
+Next day, _not before_, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over
+so that the loose grass falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your
+grass plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick
+wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and
+charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes
+good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard
+rose-trees of loofah--dyed green, and the stalks of long matches
+painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white
+immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large
+trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued
+on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be
+made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.
+
+Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool
+or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket
+bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten
+the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead
+piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back
+level, cut the stem.
+
+For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or
+marjoram make charming little trees.
+
+Shells are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of
+carving. Almost all shells will be useful in one way or another, but I
+have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly shells which you
+find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs
+of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly shells that lie on the
+rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly
+on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.
+
+[Illustration: THICK ARCHES.]
+
+Keep your shells in boxes. There are always plenty of boxes in the
+world, and if not boxes, little bags will do to hold the different kinds
+of shells. It is well worth while to keep the different kinds separate.
+The work of sorting out the shells is very damping to the eager
+enthusiast anxious to execute a decorative design. Indeed, it is well to
+keep all your building materials sorted each according to its kind, the
+wooden things together and the metal things and, above all, the crockery
+things. Keep the Noah's Ark animals in their Ark, and the bricks in
+their boxes, and when you are going to build don't get everything out
+at once and make a rubbish heap of it on the floor.
+
+[Illustration: FAN WINDOW.]
+
+As you grow more accustomed to building, you will find that sometimes
+you build a temple or palace that charms you so much that you wish to
+build it again; and you will soon learn what are the materials needed,
+and just take out those and a few more from your store. I say a few
+more, because you will never build your temple or your palace twice
+_exactly_ the same: you are sure to think of some improvement, however
+small.
+
+I have made beautiful windows with the sticks of an old ivory fan,
+framed in dark wood bricks, and ornamented the dark wall above with
+elephant tusk shells and others, and below with carved ivory card
+counters.
+
+[Illustration: THE ELEPHANT TEMPLE.]
+
+There is a certain Elephant Temple which I have built many times. Its
+floor is a red and white chessboard, and its roof is supported on a
+double row of white pillars. White pillars surround the altar--a wooden
+box--on which the ebony elephant stands. On each side of him are red
+fairy lights, hidden by buttresses from the human eye which peeps
+through the brazen gates into that shadowy interior, and falling full on
+the elephant on his pillared shrine. The walls are of big red
+books--_Sheridan's Plays_, _Tom Jones_, and Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.
+The roof is a flat square lid, once the lid of a packing case, stained a
+dark brown like the bricks. On the side are the windows made of the
+ivory fan, and the dark bricks and the elephant tusk shells. There is a
+door, too, a mother-of-pearl one; in a former life it was the card-case
+of a much-loved aunt, who nobly contributed it to the Temple. Above this
+door is a white animal from the Noah's Ark.
+
+And all the rest of that wall is built up of dark-stained brown wooden
+bricks. The other side shows between dark buttresses the red of the
+books, and towards the back of this side are small square
+buildings--wooden boxes stained brown--with brass domes and mysterious
+doorways. I think the priests and attendants of the Temple live here.
+
+The front of the Temple shows a little of the red between dark
+buttresses, which, here, are ornamented with delicate dark carved
+chessmen. The gate is of pierced brass--two finger-plates for a door,
+and the brazen pillars of the portico are two candlesticks, which
+support a brass inkstand, on which stand two yellowish wooden chessmen.
+On the middle of the roof is a big lacquered wooden bowl--the kind that
+nice grocers put in their windows full of prunes or coffee. Above is a
+brass rose-bowl, on that a finger-bowl of inlaid brass, crowned with a
+black chess king. There are two dark arches with bed-knobs on them, and
+round the roof are various towers and turrets, and tall minarets made of
+dark bricks with chessmen on the top.
+
+In front of the pillars at the gate two black elephants stand on wooden
+plinths, and the fore-court of the Temple and the space at the side are
+paved with mother-of-pearl.
+
+I know the main things that are needed for this Temple, but its details
+are changed a little every time I build it.
+
+If you cannot get mother-of-pearl card counters you can make a beautiful
+pavement by pasting the shining pods of honesty in a pattern on a piece
+of dark brown cardboard, or dark brown paper pasted on cardboard; but if
+you do this you must build a little dark-wood brick wall all round to
+hide the brown paper edges. Build gatehouses in your wall, little ones,
+to show off, by contrast, the massive splendour of your Temple. These
+honesty pods are a most useful substitute for mother-of-pearl. You can
+paste them on square pillars or on the fronts of boxes (houses I mean)
+or make sloping roofs of them by sticking them on folded cardboard
+fastened at the proper angle by tapes glued about a third of the way up.
+But as a rule sloping roofs are not good in Eastern cities. A grass
+garden with paths of honesty, or a shell-built fountain basin in the
+middle, will add a charm to any city square. And by the way, don't be
+afraid of open spaces. Have as many buildings as you like, and mass them
+together as you choose, but let there be open spaces. They will be to
+your building as mounts are to pictures or margins to books. And for
+frame or binding, let there be a wall all round your city. It gives a
+neatness and a completeness which enhance a hundred-fold all the
+qualities your city may possess.
+
+[Illustration: HONESTY ROOF.]
+
+There are cardboard models of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower Bridge,
+and the Temple at Jerusalem. These are interesting in themselves and it
+is good to put them together. The Temple, which is sold by the Religious
+Tract Society, is really beautiful, and when you have set it up it looks
+like a model in ivory. The bridge and the Cathedral are of dull brown
+pasteboard--but they are interesting for all that. But when you are
+tired of these things as models, parts of them can be used with great
+effect in your building, especially if you paint the brown ones with
+aluminium paint, or even whitewash them.
+
+In the foreground of the picture of the Astrologer's tower you will see
+a little house which doesn't look as if it belonged where it is. And no
+more it does. It was put in just to show you what these little cardboard
+buildings are like--it is one of the gate-houses of the Tower Bridge,
+and the little white house on the parapet above the steps in the picture
+of the silver towers is a little gate-house out of another model.
+
+When you are collecting shells, you will find smooth flat stones of
+pleasing colours. Collect them--the thinner the better--you can make
+mosaic floors of them, fastening them in their place with glue or a very
+thin layer of Plasticine. Fir-cones of all shapes and sizes are useful,
+from the delicate cones of the larch to the great varnished-looking
+cones that fall from the big pine trees on the Riviera; they call them
+pineapples there--_pommes-de-pin_--and they use them for lighting fires.
+But you can use them for the tops of towers.
+
+A little, and only a very little, red tinsel paper is good to use, for
+the backs of shrines. It gives a suggestion of the glow of hidden
+lamps--or, put as windows near the tops of towers, it suggests the glow
+of sunset falling on jewelled casements. You can get it, and also
+bundles of stamped strips of gold paper, which should be used very
+sparingly indeed, from Mr. Bousquet, of the Barbican, in London City.
+There are other things which could serve for part of your collection,
+but I have told about these in the chapter on poor children's cities,
+because the poorest child can get them. But they are desirable in any
+collection, such things as tobacco-tins, jam-jars, clothes-pegs, and the
+different kinds of common things that you can use for decorating the
+fronts and backs and sides of houses, if you have not enough bricks to
+build facades to them all. And remember always to make the backs of your
+houses as beautiful as the fronts. They may--and should--be plainer but
+not less beautiful. Do not be like the jerry-builders who spend all
+their decoration, such as it is, on the flat fronts of their villas, and
+leave the sides and back flat and ugly, and so that when you see the row
+of them from the railway they look miserable and dejected, as though
+they knew how ugly they were and were sorry.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The Poor Child's City
+
+
+WHEN my city was built at Olympia a great many school-teachers who came
+to see it told me that they would like to help the children in their
+schools to build such cities, but that it would not be possible because
+the children came from poor homes, where there were none of the pretty
+things--candlesticks, brass bowls, silver ash-trays, chessmen, draughts,
+well-bound books, and all the rest of it--which I had used to build my
+city. So then I said I would build a city out of the sort of things that
+poor children could collect and bring to school. And I did. My friends
+Mr. Annis and Mr. Taylor, who were helping me to explain the city and
+show it to visitors, helped me with the building. We did it in a day,
+and it was very pretty--so pretty that the school-teachers who came to
+see it asked me to write a book to say how _that_ was done. And so I
+did.
+
+There are no words to express half what I feel about the teachers in
+our Council Schools, their enthusiasm, their patience, their energy,
+their devotion. When we think of what the lives of poor children are, of
+the little they have of the good things of this world, the little chance
+they have of growing up to any better fate than that of their fathers
+and mothers, who do the hardest work of all and get the least pay of all
+those who work for money--when we think how rich people have money to
+throw away, how their dogs have velvet coats and silver collars, and eat
+chicken off china, while the little children of the poor live on bread
+and tea, and wear what they can get--often enough, too little--when we
+think of all these things, if we can bear to think of them at all, there
+is not one of us, I suppose, who would not willingly die if by our death
+we could secure for these children a fairer share of the wealth of
+England, the richest country in the world. For wealth, by which I mean
+money, can buy all those things which children ought to have, and which
+these children do not have--good food, warm clothes, fresh country air,
+playthings and books, and pictures. Remembering that by far the greater
+number of children of England have none of these things, you would, I
+know, gladly die if dying would help. To die for a cause is easy--you
+leap into the gulf like Curtius, or fall on the spears like Winkelried,
+or go down with your ship for the honour of your country. To lead a
+forlorn hope, to try to save one child from fire or water, and die in
+the attempt--that is easy and glorious. The hard thing to do is to live
+for your country--to live for its children. And it is this that the
+teachers in the Council Schools do, year in and year out, with the most
+unselfish nobility and perseverance. And nobody applauds or makes as
+much fuss as is made over a boy who saves a drowning kitten. In the face
+of enormous difficulties and obstacles, exposed to the constant
+pin-pricks of little worries, kept short of space, short of materials
+and short of money, yet these teachers go on bravely, not just doing
+what they are paid to do, but a thousand times more, devoting heart,
+mind, and soul to their splendid ambition and counting themselves well
+paid if they can make the world a better and a brighter place for the
+children they serve. If these children when they grow up shall prove
+better citizens, kinder fathers, and better, wiser, and nobler than
+their fathers were, we shall owe all the change and progress to the
+teachers who are spending their lives to this end.
+
+And this I had to say before I could begin to write about how cities
+may be built of such materials as poor children can collect and bring to
+school.
+
+For I have to own that poor children live in such little crowded houses
+that there is no room for the building of cities, and in the courts and
+streets where they play they cannot build, for the passers-by would
+tumble over their cities, and the policemen would call it an
+obstruction. So if they have a city at all it must be where they have
+most of their pleasant plays--at school. Besides, the children I have in
+mind are so very poor, that no one child could possibly collect enough
+materials for a city. But a number of children could each of them bring
+a few things, and thus make up enough for the building. And in most
+schools there will be some children not quite so poor who can afford a
+penny or so for tinsel paper and the few things--colours, paints, and so
+on--that do not occur naturally in a house, even a well-to-do house.
+These, let us hope, will be able to furnish a few old chessmen, for
+there is nothing like chessmen for giving an air of elegance to domes
+and minarets. If you cannot get chessmen, small clothes-pegs are good.
+You can cut them in halves and then you have two kinds of minaret. They
+can be coloured red or dark brown, or, if your city seems likely to
+lack metal, you can paint them with gold or aluminium paint. They look
+well when cut shorter as the battlements of buildings, rather like halma
+men, but of handsomer and more rotund proportions. Your halma man as you
+buy him in a box is ever a bit of a starveling. If you cut your peg into
+three, the middle section will make short round pillars to support
+little galleries, the roof being a strip of mill-board or the lid of a
+narrow box.
+
+[Illustration: CLOTHES PEGS.]
+
+Cardboard and wooden boxes of all sizes and shapes are always easy to
+get. These can be coloured as explained in another chapter, and little
+doors and windows cut in them. But be sparing of windows; too many
+windows detract from the dignity of your tower, and make it look like a
+factory. In poor schools there will not be many bricks, and something
+must be done to add variety to the facades of buildings when there are
+not enough bricks to cover or decorate your boxes. A good deal can be
+done with haricot beans, tapioca, and sago. Fasten the beans round the
+doorways and the windows with glue or seccotine or Plasticine. If you
+use glue let the bean-work be quite cold before you do anything else
+with it. "Next day" is an excellent rule. When the beans are quite
+firmly fixed, glue the surface all over and sprinkle _thickly_ with
+tapioca so that not a bit of the box shows. Leave the tapioca lying on
+the surface till _next day_, then turn it up; the loose tapioca will
+fall off and leave a pleasant rough-cast-looking surface. Round
+cardboard boxes, such as muff-boxes or biscuit-boxes make splendid
+towers treated in this way. If you cannot get the little round yellow
+periwinkly shells, maize is very good if you cut each grain flat with a
+sharp knife, and fix the grains with glue as pillars and arches. Tin
+boxes or round tins polished to silvery brightness, with doors and
+windows and crenellations of black _passe-partout_, can be built into
+palaces of astonishing splendour, as you can see in the picture of the
+silver towers. But always beware of too many windows. Other excellent
+towers are jam-pots: you can paint them any colour you like, but I
+advise you to stick to terra-cotta, cream colour, and dark brown. Very
+pretty towers can be made of white jam-pots with windows and doors and
+crenellation of gold paper. Only you should outline the gold with ink or
+dark stain to make it show up against the white. Basins that are cracked
+make good domes, and you can almost always get a cracked basin, however
+poor you are; tea-cups that have lost their handles, or had a piece
+bitten out of them, are also not hard to get, and the lids of teapots
+that are broken, and of saucepans that have been burnt through, come
+readily enough to the hand of the collector. Honey pots and the little
+brown jugs that cream is sold in are easy to come by, and make
+Moorish-looking domes for buildings.
+
+When once you begin to build, you will find that all sorts of things
+that before looked neither useful nor beautiful become both, when they
+are built into your city. Look at the bedstead-knobs in the Elephant
+Temple, and the pepper-pots and the tea-cups on the top of the tower of
+pearl and red.
+
+[Illustration: TOWERS AND COCOANUT COTTAGE.]
+
+Those children who are lucky enough to go into the country for a holiday
+can collect fir-cones and acorns; nicely shaped bits of wood are more
+easily come by in a country village than in a London slum. Acorns are
+most useful, both the acorn and the cup. A brown building with doors and
+windows outlined in acorn cups with their flat side set on with glue
+looks like a precious work of carved wood. If you can't get acorn cups,
+the shells of Barcelona nuts are good, but they are difficult to cut
+into the needed cup shape. The shells of pea-nuts on a stone-coloured
+building look like carved stones, but always the nutshell must fit its
+edges tightly and neatly to the surface and show as a little round neat
+boss. Your own observation will supply you with other little and
+valueless things, which will become valuable as soon as you stick them
+evenly and closely on a foundation of their own colour. The periwinkly
+shells and the maize grains look best on white wood. The shells of the
+cocoanut have a value all their own. The larger ones, sawn neatly in
+halves, make impressive domes for brown buildings, and half a small
+cocoanut shell will roof a cardboard box that has held elastic bands,
+and you can call it a thatched cottage or the hut of a savage chief. I
+called mine Cocoanut Cottage, and the Curator of my Botanical Museum
+lived there. The Chief Astrologer, of course, lived at the top of his
+tower, which was a photographic enlarging apparatus. Ponds and rivers
+can be made with the silver paper that comes off cigarettes, and I have
+made a very impressive tower with match boxes, painted black and piled
+one on another so that the blue side shows in front, with a touch of red
+at each side. Black windows if you like. If you cannot get any chessmen
+the pinnacles of your buildings must be clothes-pegs, acorns, and
+fir-cones, with a very occasional piece of lead pencil or short piece of
+brass tubing with an acorn or a fir-cone on the top. Fir-cones, too,
+look quite baronial stuck upright on the posts of gates--and they are
+good edging for paths and roads. Pill-boxes make nice little turrets,
+and cotton reels, coloured to match the bricks and the boxes, are the
+finest flower tubs in the world. With sprigs of evergreen stuck in them,
+or a little made rose-tree, they look quite life-like and convincing,
+especially if you paste a circle of brown paper on the top of the reel,
+to look like mould, before you stick your shrub in the hole so
+conveniently placed in the reel, apparently on purpose to have shrubs
+planted in it. Cotton reels with acorns or fir-cones on them are good on
+the top of gate-posts.
+
+[Illustration: COTTON REELS.]
+
+[Illustration: LATTICE WINDOW.]
+
+These are just a few of the things that poor children can get and the
+way they can use them. The moment you begin to build you will think of
+a hundred things that I have not thought of, and a hundred ways of using
+them that I should not have thought of trying.
+
+If you can so arrange the site of your city that it need not be
+disturbed, it will grow in beauty day by day, and you will presently
+have to name a day to satisfy the children who will want to bring their
+parents to see it. If you give a school party no other attraction will
+be needed, and you will find that neither children nor parents will tire
+of examining your city as a whole and in detail, exclaiming at its
+beauty and marvelling at its ingenuity. And the children will love it.
+And so will you.
+
+If you are disposed to take a little more trouble with your towers, you
+can cover them with cement, and mould the crenellations and windows with
+your fingers. The cement is made of newspaper, size, and whitening. Tear
+up two newspapers and boil them in four quarts of water for three hours.
+Then pound the paper in a large mortar, or squeeze it in your hands till
+it is all pulp. It will have an unpleasing grey colour at this stage,
+but in the end it will be creamy white. Then add equal quantities of
+size and whitening and a pinch of yellow ochre, mix thoroughly and let
+the mixture get cold, when it is ready for use. If it is too thin warm
+it again, and add more whitening, but do not let the mixture _boil_
+after the size has been added. When the mixture with which you have
+covered your tower is dry,--it takes some days--it will be as hard as
+stone. A cocoa tin set on a treacle tin makes a very neat tower, as you
+will see by the picture. Square towers can also be made in this way, by
+covering square tins with the cement. In fact, with a little trouble and
+some tins of different sizes and shapes you could build a whole palace
+in this way. Doors can be made of black paper, and lattices of paper cut
+and folded, with black paper behind it, as you can see for yourself by
+the picture.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The End
+
+
+YOU will have noticed that though I began by pointing out that children
+differ as much as grown-up people do, and that the individual character
+and temperament of one child are not the character and temperament of
+another, yet I have throughout spoken of the needs of the child as
+though the needs of all children were the same. That is because, in the
+body of this work, I have been dealing with the needs of children as a
+genus, and not with those of the individual or species. There are
+certain needs common to all children, needs as universal as the need for
+food, raiment, warmth, and light. Such are the needs for sympathy and
+justice, leisure and liberty. These things are admitted by all but the
+driest economists to be the rights of adults, but not, alas! always
+admitted as the rights of children. And I have tried to show a little
+what it is that is essential to the true well-being of all children. The
+hungers and thirsts of the individual spirit cannot be dealt with by
+any but those in close relation to the individual child. I have tried to
+lay down broad outlines--to make suggestions, to point out pleasant ways
+leading to pleasant places. Parents, teachers, pastors and masters will
+make the application--or the variation--in every individual case.
+
+One of the things that is the matter with modern education is the
+absence of the conception of personal idiosyncrasies, tastes, character
+and temperament. For the matter of that it is this indifference to
+personality which makes the whole of our civilisation vulgar and vain.
+Our education treats children as though they were all cast in one mould;
+it treats men and women as though they, in their sphere, differed not at
+all one from another. You will say that it is impossible, in a great
+country and a great school, to find out the personal tastes and wishes,
+hopes, dreams, powers, and possibilities of individuals, and you are
+quite right. That is why large schools and large communities fail so
+detestably in the very objects of their existence. Schools are intended
+to educate, and they merely instruct. Communities are, at least I
+suppose they are, intended to enable their members to live happy and
+useful lives as free citizens, and they only succeed in making slaves
+of the many and tyrants of the few. The machinery of government and the
+machinery of so-called education is too big--what it has to deal with is
+too big--for any fine result to be possible. If we are ever to get out
+of children, and men and women, anything like the best of which they are
+capable, we shall have to have much smaller schools and much smaller
+communities. Some sort of beautiful and useful corporate life is
+possible in a place the size of Bedford; it is not possible in a place
+the size of London. Ten or twenty children in a class can be treated as
+individual human beings, and the best that is in them drawn out by a
+sympathetic understanding of personal traits and characteristics. But a
+class of seventy or eighty must be treated as a machine of which the
+little live units are but wheels and cogs. It can, as a machine, be made
+to do certain things; the component parts of it can be made to
+contribute their share to the general result, even as the bright and
+helpless parts of a machine contribute to its activity. But you can
+never get out of the children composing such a class anything
+approaching the fine result which can be achieved by an education based
+on the broad lines of what is good for _children_, with a superstructure
+of delicate perception of what is good for the _individual child_.
+Dick, Tom, and Harry can join in certain lessons and certain games, but
+there will always be some matters in which Dick is not in the least like
+Tom, and Harry is quite different from both the others.
+
+The people who govern us talk about education--they talk greatly, and a
+little they do. But they will not do the one simple, straightforward
+thing which is as essential to the growth of the mind as vital religion
+is to the growth of the soul. Any teacher in any elementary school knows
+what is needed, but those in power do not know it. They will make
+scholarships as plentiful as blackberries, they will do all sorts of
+fine things for secondary education. The one thing they will not do is
+to _reduce the size of the classes_ in elementary schools. And so long
+as this is not done the millions we spend yearly on education are, to a
+pitiably great extent, millions wasted. We might almost as well take at
+least half the money, put it in bags, tie it up with red tape, and drop
+it over London Bridge, or, still better, spend the money in monthly
+exhibitions of free fireworks, which would at least give the children
+and the grown-ups one jolly evening in thirty.
+
+A small class can be taught, and taught well, by a teacher of as
+average ability as ever tumbled head over heels from London to York, but
+a large class your average teacher will never get at at all. It takes a
+genius and an orator to speak intelligibly to more than fifteen people.
+I sometimes wonder if teachers know how much of their teaching their
+scholars miss altogether--fail to see, fail to grasp, do not know is
+there. Between the careless or overworked teacher and the timid and
+rather stupid child there is a great gulf fixed. To such a child the
+voice of the teacher is the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
+crying quite aimlessly, in a wilderness of unintelligible jargon. Many
+boys--in public as well as elementary schools by the way--go through
+their whole school life "scraping through somehow," and never once
+having a clear idea of anything that they are doing, hardly ever a
+glimpse of what anything is about or that anything has any reasonable
+relation to anything else. It is rather like a miracle, whichever way
+you take it, but there it is, and a miracle which might be made
+impossible and unnecessary by a little sensible commonplace legislation.
+We want smaller classes, and we want those classes better taught. That
+is to say, we want more teachers, and better-paid teachers; we want our
+teachers to be placed in a position of certain comfort, that they shall
+not be living in the House of Poverty with the wolf of Worry always
+nosing round the door, distracting their attention from what should be
+their chief thought--for most of the months of the year. We want longer
+holidays, and a better provision for happiness in those holidays, both
+for teachers and children. We want every teacher and every child to have
+a real holiday, not merely an absence from school. In a word, we want
+more money spent on schools and less on gaols and reformatories. It
+cannot be put too plainly that the nation which will not pay for her
+schools must pay for her prisons and asylums. People don't seem to mind
+so much paying for prisons and workhouses. What they really hate seems
+to be paying for schools. And yet how well, in the end, such spending
+would pay us! "There is no darkness but ignorance," and we have now such
+a chance as has never been the lot of men since Time began, a chance to
+light enough lamps to dispel that darkness. If only we would take that
+chance! Even from the meanest point of view we ought to take it. It
+would be cheaper in the end. Schools are cheaper than prisons.
+
+Now that I have written the words I don't like the look of them; and
+looking back through this book, I see that most of what I have written
+applies to the kind of children who are in little danger of going to
+prison, children in comfortable homes, with enough of, at any rate,
+material well-being. Most of my book refers to the class that is not
+taught in Council Schools, and that will not be sent to a reformatory if
+the eighth commandment is not learnt in one lesson. This class is called
+the upper middle-class, and it does not go to the Council Schools
+because it has money to go elsewhere. The children of this class are, in
+brain and heart, not superior to the children of what are called the
+working classes. Place the middle-class children in the surroundings of
+the slum child, and thereupon the middle-class child would grow as the
+slum child grows, as the plant debarred from light grows--_not
+straight_. What we want is that there should be a distribution of wealth
+so changed from the one that now destroys the nation's balance as to put
+every parent in a position to pay for his child's education, and that
+the nation's schools should be so superlatively better than all other
+schools that no parent would dream of sending his child to any school
+but that provided by the nation for the nation's children.
+
+And now that it comes to good-bye, I am sorry to say it. I feel that I
+have only been touching the fringe of the greatest problem in the world:
+that there is very much which I have left unsaid, or which I might have
+said differently, and better. One might go on for all one's life
+thinking and writing about children and their needs, and always there
+would be more unsaid than said, less thought than food for thought. If
+the thoughts which I have striven to set forth give food for thought in
+others, if my little candle may help to kindle a great torch, I shall
+look back on the writing of this book as a great privilege and the
+memory of the hours spent on it I shall treasure with a glad and
+grateful heart.
+
+
+_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Varried hyphenation retained. Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Wings and the Child, by E. [Edith] Nesbit
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